Steve teaches in pictures. He’d rather hand you something you already know, like a bag of concrete, a tractor or a walk up a mountain, than a page of chemistry. And he comes back to the same few lines, again and again, until they stick.
Each one below is in his words, with what he means by it and the pages that go further. When you hear one, look it up here.
Start with why
- “Healthy Plants are the Root of your Profit.”
- His line for everything he does. The profit starts with the plant: a healthy crop gives you the yield, and the quality that gets paid for.
- Read more: Recoveries, Soil health
- “Yield is not necessarily the profit. It’s the recoveries on the yield.”
- “There’s two levers you want to pull: one’s all about the yield lever, and one’s about the quality lever.”
- What you harvest isn’t what you’re paid for. Recoveries are how much of it makes it through grading and gets paid for, and that’s where the profit is. So pull both levers: lifting quality can be worth more than lifting yield alone.
- Read more: Recoveries
- “Tell me what your market wants.”
- “Now I can reverse engineer that, and go all the way back to the front end.”
- Where Steve starts with any crop. Begin at the end, with what the buyer pays for: even sizes, good skins, fruit that keeps. Then work back to the stage in the crop that decides it, and build the program around that stage.
- Read more: Potatoes, Critical stages of influence
- “The scorecard for health is your plant.”
- “From whose perspective are you trying to gauge health from: yours, or the plant’s?”
- Judge health from the plant’s side, not from a soil test or a sales pitch. How the crop grows, and what it gives you, is the score.
- Read more: Soil health, Stress & salt, Sap testing
- “If you want your soil to change, you got to put a plant in there.”
- “You’re just balancing the chemistry. That’s not health.”
- Balancing a soil test isn’t the same as a healthy soil. Plants change soil: their roots, and the life they feed right around them.
- Read more: Soil health
Pour the foundation
- “The three amigos”
- “Calcium, boron and silicon, which I call the three amigos.”
- The three minerals of the foundation. They build the plant’s cells and the walls around them, so they go in before the cells divide, and keep coming while they do.
- Read more: 20CaCalcium, 5BBoron, 14SiSilicon
- “Would you go and build a house on it?”
- “Why don’t you throw some potassium in that mix, and see how the foundation works?”
- Steve’s picture for the foundation is concrete: get the recipe right, and pour it before the house goes up. Throw something else in the mix, like potassium around flowering, and you’ve changed the recipe in the bag.
- Read more: The foundation, Cell division windows
- “The lone wolf, Mr Potassium”
- Potassium stands apart from the three amigos. It isn’t part of the foundation: it comes after, to fill what the foundation holds up.
- Read more: 19KPotassium
- “Earn the right to use potassium.”
- “Build the foundations, build the house, fill it with potassium. Now you’ve got yield and quality.”
- Potassium fills the fruit, so it’s often first on the order. Steve’s rule is the other way round: pour the foundation first, and bring potassium in when the crop needs it for filling, not before.
- Read more: 19KPotassium, Sizing and bulking
Keep the engine running
- “The plants are put on this earth to do one thing: to photosynthesise.”
- “How can we effectively increase that photosynthesis? We don’t have to go through the mechanics of what is photosynthesis.”
- Everything a crop does is paid for with the sugar its leaves make. Steve doesn’t ask growers how photosynthesis works. He asks how to keep that engine running, and running well.
- Read more: Photosynthetic efficiency
- “I’m going to give you one thing to take home today: photosynthetic efficiency and manganese.”
- Steve doesn’t ask growers to learn the chemistry of photosynthesis. He gives them one thing to do: check the manganese, because the leaf’s engine can’t run well without it.
- Read more: Photosynthetic efficiency, 25MnManganese
- “That hidden engine of crop performance”
- What Steve calls manganese. The plant needs only a little, but it sits at the very start of photosynthesis, and short of it the engine runs rough before the leaves show a thing.
- Read more: 25MnManganese
- “It’s no good looking at the Ferrari, and then you go and lift the hood and there’s no engine in it.”
- “When you go and buy a tractor, you know to the horsepower what it can and can’t do.”
- A crop can look the part from the road. What pays is the engine under the hood: how well its leaves turn sunlight into sugar. Know it the way you’d know a tractor before you bought it.
- Read more: Photosynthetic efficiency
Nitrogen into protein
- “Nitrogen is a liability until it becomes a protein.”
- Nitrogen only pays once the plant has built it into protein. Until then it’s soft, sappy growth that pests and disease go for. So it’s not just how much you put on: it’s whether the plant can finish the job.
- Read more: 7NNitrogen, Pests & plant health
- “All nitrogen is not equal.”
- What form it’s in, when it goes on, and whether the plant can finish it: all three decide what a unit of nitrogen does for your crop.
- Read more: 7NNitrogen
- “The assembly line”
- How the plant builds nitrogen into protein: step by step, like parts moving down a line. Short of energy or a part, the line backs up, and the nitrogen waits in the sap, unfinished.
- Read more: 7NNitrogen
Time it to the stage
- “Critical stage of influence”
- “It’s understanding those critical stages of influence.”
- The stages of a crop’s life, each a time when what the plant gets decides how the season ends up. Steve builds every program around them, and times every input to what the plant is doing.
- Read more: Critical stages of influence
- “The fundamentals are the same.”
- “What are your critical stages?”
- Steve doesn’t have to have grown your crop to help you with it. He asks for its critical stages, and the same fundamentals apply: cell division, then sizing or bulking, then maturity.
- Read more: Critical stages of influence, Cell division windows, Sizing and bulking, Maturity
- “Quality is all about cell division.”
- “Orchard crops, or other crops like limes and avocados, they probably have more of a three to four week window, as opposed to some of your row crops like beans. It’s more of a seven day window, or three or four day window.”
- A fruit, tuber or pod makes most of its cells early, in a short window, then grows mostly by filling them. How many cells it has, and how well they’re built, is largely settled in that window, and the window doesn’t come back.
- Read more: Cell division windows, 20CaCalcium, Tree crops
- “For maturity in beans, it’s about pushing and pulling them.”
- “I want to extend the maturity by three days, so I can mechanically harvest that, not bypassing this crop to jump into that one.”
- A crop’s finish can be moved a few days either way. Hold a bean crop back three days, and it’s ready when the harvester is, instead of being skipped for the next one. What counts is what comes off in spec.
- Read more: Maturity, Beans
- “Performance flight plan”
- Steve’s name for a season’s plan, stage by stage: what the crop is doing, what it needs, and when to sap test. His plan for poppies runs 140 days. It’s one to pin on the wall, where you can see each morning where the crop is up to.
- Read more: Critical stages of influence, Poppies, Foliar or soil
- “Walk up the mountain without any water”
- “You’re going to make it halfway, and then keel over.”
- Cutting a crop’s program back, to save money. It gets halfway, and then it’s short when it matters most.
- Read more: Critical stages of influence
Read the plant
- “How is it shifting?”
- “It’s a single factor number. That’s just telling you what’s in the healthy part of the plant.”
- One sap test is a single number: what was in the plant the day you took it. A run of them, taken the same way at the same stages, shows which way the plant is heading, and which minerals are on the move.
- Read more: Sap testing, Mobile & immobile minerals
- “Why is that pest there?”
- “You’re asking the wrong question.”
- Before you reach for the spray, ask what the pest is telling you. Pests and disease go for plants that are out of balance. Fix what it’s pointing at, and the crop defends more of itself.
- Read more: Pests & plant health, 7NNitrogen
Crop by crop
- “Your capsule is where you get paid for your tonnage, plus your alkaloid content.”
- In poppies, everything comes back to the capsule: its weight, and the alkaloids in it. They’re two jobs, and the program is built for both.
- Read more: Poppies
- “Potatoes is all about stolon development, cell division, bulking.”
- Steve’s critical stages for potatoes, in a line. The stolons set how many tubers there’ll be, the cells divide in each young tuber, and then the tubers bulk up. The same fundamentals as every crop, by their own names.
- Read more: Potatoes, Critical stages of influence
- “These beans will size up rapidly, due to the water and the potassium, but their structural life and disease resistance will be extremely fragile.”
- From one of his sap reports. Size on water and potassium alone looks good, and doesn’t last: without the foundation under it, a fast-sizing pod is fragile.
- Read more: Beans, Sizing and bulking
- “You’re not in there to grow beef, you’re in there to grow energy.”
- On pasture. A grazier is paid for what the pasture puts on the stock, and that’s energy. Once a plant has made its sugar and finished its protein, it stores the energy it has to spare, and he reads that as what fattens stock so quickly.
- Read more: Pests & plant health
“How is it communicating to you? That’s the question you want to ask.”