Listening to the Plant: Biological Inputs and Precision Nutrition at Perry Farms

Perry Farms | Regenerative Alberta Living Lab

For Harold Perry, the question driving a lot of the input decisions on Perry Farms near Chin, Alberta is a simple one: does the plant actually need this? Getting closer to an answer has shaped how the operation approaches both foliar applications and fertility management.

The data side of that work runs through a detailed petiole and sap testing program throughout the growing season. Rather than applying nutrients on a calendar schedule, Harold and his agronomist use the test results to track what the plant is actually taking up at different growth stages and respond accordingly. If a nutrient is showing adequate in the plant, it doesn't go on. That approach has meant reducing applications of inputs the crop doesn't need, which carries two practical benefits. It brings down input costs, and it reduces the emissions associated with manufacturing and applying fertilizers that weren't necessary in the first place. Perry Farms won an award from Frito-Lay for data collection and recordkeeping in North America, which reflects how systematically this monitoring program has been built out over time.

The biological side of the foliar program is newer and still being worked through. This season Harold has been trialling drone application of vermicompost extract, a liquid worm casting product, alongside micronutrients including manganese sulfate and magnesium. The reasoning behind the vermicompost application is to establish living biology on the plant surface itself. The idea is that if beneficial organisms are already occupying space on the leaf, pathogens have a harder time finding a site to take hold. It is a competition-for-space approach rather than a chemical suppression approach.

The drone application has run into a practical challenge that is fairly specific to Chin: wind. What registers as a light wind in that part of southern Alberta can exceed what the drone can reliably operate in, which affects both application consistency and the cost-benefit picture. Harold is still working through whether drone application makes sense at scale on this farm, and that assessment is ongoing. It is an honest example of how a practice that works well in one context doesn't automatically translate to another, and why the iteration matters.

Both the foliar biology work and the precision nutrition program connect to a broader goal Harold describes consistently across his operation: building a soil and plant system that can regulate itself. The petiole and sap testing is one way of checking whether that system is functioning, and stepping back from inputs when it is. The biological foliar work is an attempt to extend that thinking above ground, supporting the plant's own capacity to manage disease pressure rather than relying on chemistry to do it.

There is a resilience argument running underneath all of it. Every input the plant doesn't actually need is one the farm doesn't have to buy, and reducing that dependency builds resilience on two fronts at once. In the soil, a system that supplies more of its own fertility is less fragile and less reliant on anything trucked in. In the business, leaning less on purchased fertilizer means less exposure to the price spikes and supply swings that have made fertilizer one of the more volatile costs a producer carries. It is the same logic the Perrys apply to closing the nutrient loop with their anaerobic digester (see Closing the Loop): fertility the farm generates or holds onto itself is fertility insulated from the market.

That resilience showed up in a concrete way during a recent season of weather extremes. A hot, above-average spring is hard on nitrogen, the kind of conditions that can leave a crop short at a critical point. Because the Perrys had diversified their fertility sources, leaning on compost and digestate rather than synthetic nitrogen alone, their nitrogen supply held more stable through that stress. Perry Farms came through with about a 3% yield reduction that year. Other operations in the area saw yields down by as much as 20%. The Perrys weren't the ones who first framed it as resilience, it was their banker who pointed to the gap and named what it was worth.

Within the Regenerative Alberta Living Lab, Perry Farms is one of a network of operations across the province where producers are integrating multiple soil health principles simultaneously, not as a bundle of separate practices, but as a whole-farm system. The project's soil sampling program and annual GHG tracking are building a five-year record of what that integrated approach produces in the soil. The petiole and sap testing program connects directly to one of the project's core questions: what does minimizing inputs, applying only what the plant actually needs, do to farm-scale emissions and soil health over time. The drone foliar trial, still being assessed for cost-benefit and practical fit in Chin's wind conditions, is an example of the kind of iterative adaptation the Living Lab is designed to document, not just what producers are doing, but why, and what they learn when a practice doesn't transfer as expected.