Interview with Mike Mobley - Progressive Land Management

You can also watch this episode of Farm Talk on our YouTube channel.
CLICK HERE to Subscribe!

On this edition of FarmTalk Paul interviews Mike Mobley, the President of Progressive Land Management.

Progressive Land Management, Inc. provides complete ranch management and consulting with the highest quality care and professional service. We cultivate success through proven agricultural practices while focusing on each customer’s specific needs and maximizing returns.

Transcript

Farm Talk: Interview with Mike Mobley of Progressive Land Management

Paul Ward: Paul Ward here and welcome to another edition of Farm Talk. We are so excited to have Mike Mobley, president of Progressive Land Management with us today. Thanks Mike, for joining us

Mike Mobley: (Happy) to be here, Paul, thanks for asking me.

Paul Ward: Absolutely. So Mike, you are the president and founder, I believe of Progressive Land Management, a farm management company here in Ventura County.

Mike Mobley: That’s correct. I started my company back in 1987, so we’re 33 years old this year.

Paul Ward: Great. And you manage farms, not just for yourself, but for other farmers. Is that, is that correct?

Mike Mobley: Yeah. People (are) on ranch properties for all kinds of reasons, investment reasons, or they want to live on the ranch or you know, maybe they inherited it. There’s all kinds of reasons. Maybe there’s a farmer that has had the property for a long time and has retired and wants someone else to manage it. So we do all the cultural work for ranches and basically it’s a full service we can do as little as the customer needs or we can do all the management or we can just even maybe just develop the ranch. We specialize in citrus and avocados, but we actually can work with all trees and vines and I mean, anything. We’ve grown corn and pumpkins and we can grow pretty much anything.

Paul Ward: Gotcha. So what would be kind of the typical ranch size that somebody would say, “come manage my?”

Mike Mobley: Well, a lot of ranches tend to be like 20 acres, but we have, like in Ohio, there’s smaller ranches, maybe only three acres in size. We’ve had a hundred acre ranches and some even larger than that. But I would say the average size is 20 acres.

Paul Ward: Okay. So if a city slicker wanted to come up to Ventura County and become a farmer, you could assist with that. They could say, “Hey, I just want to live in a beautiful space and have somebody professionally manage my farm, or maybe they want to, you know, kind of pick up some of the information and take over over a period of time. You could assist with that.

Mike Mobley: Yeah. Most people, when they buy a property, they don’t have any knowledge of agriculture and they are looking to. They don’t want to lose money on the property. They want to have an expert opinion on what to grow especially if there’s nothing planted on the property. Now I can assist with deciding what crops to grow, which ones are the best investments, but if it has existing crops, typically it needs some work to get in the shape, but most people just don’t have the knowledge or the desire to learn or even the time to commit to doing it themselves. So that’s why they hire a professional management company like us to do it. Some people want to help out on weekends and we encourage that. If they want to just go out and just pick the fruit in the family orchard,  it doesn’t really matter to us. We can do as little as needed or we can do a turn key where all they do is write us a monthly check. 

Paul Ward: What would you say to somebody who fell in love with 123 Banana Street and it had an existing orchard, they were thinking about buying the property. What would be some of the things that you would look at if they’re kind of giving serious consideration to buying an orchard? What would it be? Some of the things that you would look at initially and advise them on?

Mike Mobley: Well, when you’re looking at property, the very first thing you always look at is the water source. Where is the water coming from? Is it a well that’s on the property? If there is a well what’s the capacity of the well? What kind of energy source does it use? Does it use natural gas for a motor or use electricity or some other for?  Then you look at the soil. You want to see what kind of soil the property has. Then the geographic location. Some areas tend to be very cold and sensitive to or, say, vulnerable to frost. You’d want to make sure that there’s adequate frost protection in some areas that are very vulnerable to an East wind and you’d want to have maybe wind protection, maybe some windbreak trees or to have a different kind of crop that is not as susceptible to wind damage. Then the land or the soil. Then the trees; that there are trees. We need to access and assess the health of the trees. Try to try to figure out what kind of care they received, what kind of health they’re in. If they’re not healthy, what it would take to get them to a healthy, more productive state. People always want to know the cost. They want to  get an estimate, what is it going to cost to fix up the property, maybe plant more trees and/or upgrade. Maybe it needs a new irrigation system or maybe they want to add electronics. Maybe they want to convert a manual irrigation system to a complete automatic where we’d put in a sensor that would sense the dryness of the soil. And once it got o a certain dryness, the irrigation system would kick on start automatically and would run for a period of time until it replaced the water that the trees used.

The same way with frost protection, we can put automatic devices on the wind machines where the wind machines start at a temperature that we set before it freezes. Then we have it set for a temperature to shut off. So basically it’s automatic and it has to be there to turn on and off. That’s really not only a money saver but also a time saver and gives people a level of comfort that they don’t need to worry about it. If they go on vacation or leave the property for an extended period of time. We would be there as a backup, but if they have an automatic system, it’s going to irrigate, it’s going to do the frost control, whatever it needs. That’s kind of the way that culture has been going;  much higher technology. With all those, there’s certainly a cost involved, but it always involves less or savings of labor and money and saving your crop. I mean, if you had, you know, $200,000 worth of avocados in your trees, you could lose the entire crop in one night. If the temperature gets down to like 28 or below, but running water as a heat source or running a wind machine can bring up the temperature and save your crop and make all the difference.

Paul Ward: Years ago I sold a property and the owner was way ahead of his time. He’d worked for Hughes Aircraft for 35 years and he was very tech savvy. He had moisture readers in the soil, in different zones of the property. Every morning he would get an email with the evaporation rate sent to his computer every morning. It took a while to sell the property. I think everybody was so intimidated by his system that he had created. They said, “my gosh, what would happen if it broke?” I mean, you are selling this property, but you’re also in some ways selling the technology. Now the technology is so advanced. You could just go on your phone, see how much water is in the tank, turn the water on for a few minutes or so many hours. You can essentially be anywhere in the world almost and see what’s happening at your property.

Mike Mobley: Now we have moisture sensors that will calculate the moisture level in the soil about every 13 minutes. You can see it on your phone. You could have it in graph form right on your smartphone. You could see how the soil is getting and you can predict within two, three, maybe even a week in advance that it’s on this day, in this period of time, it’s going to require irrigation. You can predict it way in advance, but the best thing is not only knowing when to turn it on, but it’s even more important when to turn the water off. So you can have the right soil. There is a device that measures the level of soil or measured level of moisture in the soil from the surface all the way down to like 30 inches.

As you irrigate, you can see the water at the upper foot profile get wetter  but it’s dry down below. You can actually physically watch the moisture level as the water goes down. You want to be able to shut the water off before the water gets below the root zone. If you did that, you’ve basically just wasted water. There’s no reason to water below the root zone unless you’re leaching it. If you’re trying to leech the salts out of the soil, which we do occasionally, that’d be the only reason to do that. But otherwise these devices are great at saving water and allowing us to measure and predict exactly how much water to add to the system.

Paul Ward: I typically tell people too, that I’d rather have a crappy, you know, buy a crappy Grove with good water than a beautiful grow with, you know, risky, expensive water. You know, cause the cost of water is such a factor in farming today.

Mike Mobley:  Yeah. With high cost water, the only way to make money is to have consistently high production. And that kind of puts a lot of pressure on the orchard to consistently have high production every year. That is not really practical some years, there’s going to be years where the crop just doesn’t set and you’re gonna have lower yields. You might lose money that year but then the next year you might make it up. When you have high water your profit margins are very thin. It is definitely a risk. We  much prefer a well water situation versus buying it from the County or district, which is much higher cost. 

Paul Ward: What do you think the future is in farming in terms of just kind of where we’re going and technologies and new crops? I know that the Gem avocados are becoming quite popular as opposed to the traditional Hass or Lamb Hass, what do you think is happening?

Mike Mobley: Well, speaking of the crops, I know the best avocados and citrus in Ventura County. We are seeing a big increase in the number of avocado acreage. It’s mostly Hass but there are quite a bit of this new variety called Gem. Gem only represents about 10% of the industry’s production right now that is because Gem is a great avocado because it produces higher volumes than Hass and has a better flavor because it has more oil. So people prefer the Gem avocado versus Hass. So avocado acres are going to continue for a long time. I mean, we see demand keep increasing. We see higher end parts from Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and even other countries, but people can still consume them. I think they figured the last five years’ consumption of avocados in the United States has actually doubled. I think it was 3- 3.5 pounds per person. Now it’s up to 7 pounds per person but in Mexico, the production and the consumption is around 25 pounds per person. So where the United States has a long way to go if we’re at 7 and they are 25. We’re expecting the market to grow quite a bit over the next few years. There’s quite a bit of lemons that are going in too. A lot of people think that the lemon industry is definitely stable and a good investment but I think we’re reaching the point where we might be approaching saturation and the maximum acres that can be profitable and still supply the market without going over supply, as there are quite a bit of a foreign fruit that comes in especially from Chile, Mexico, and Argentina.

So we expect the lemon market to stay strong but I think we’ll see progressively fewer acres going in as the market kind of stabilizes. Our tree’s age is over 50 years and might be closer to 60 years. Our trees are very old and have quality issues. We see a little bit of new going in, but I think over time people are going to realize that their older trees really need to be replaced with younger trees that are going to be more productive and have better quality fruit. There’s definitely a market for lemons in Ventura County because our first six week period, basically the end or say the last two weeks of August through the entire month of September Ventura County is about the only place in the world that you can get a good Valencia tree or Valencia oranges, which are sold fresh, but most people use them as juice.

They’re super sweet. So we have the corn on the market for that six week period. So prices tend to be very high, very profitable, but what brings Ventura County down is the quality of the fruit. We have a very small percentage of actually going into a box and sold fresh much higher pressure percent is sold as juice, which isn’t as profitable. So as people realize that they need to recondition the trees, take, take out the old flincher trees and replant new, I think that’ll be a good, good variety, especially in places in the County where it’s really too cold to grow anything else it’s too cold for lemons is too cold for avocados, but like an OHI it’s perfect for Valencia oranges parts of Peru where it’s very cold, great place for oranges. We still see quite a bit of mandarins.There’s not that many going in the market, you know, there’s, it’s over saturated in Satsumas but there are other varieties that are really, probably better suited for Ventura County. Those that are sterile and still very profitable. Also the Navel variety is very popular. It has a little bit more of a pink tone to the flesh and they are kind of like a Blood Apple. It reminds me of a Blood Orange but not as red as that. It is more of a Pink versus a Washington Navel. But the Cara Cara has seemed to be doing very well, very popular as an up and coming Naval variety. And again, that can go in those colder areas that is just too, too cold for avocados.

Paul Ward: Interesting. Do you see anybody converting from conventional to organic? I know a few organic farmers that are saying that they’re getting some great prices, especially on avocados significantly higher than conventional and you see people doing the conversion.

Mike Mobley: Yeah. there’s definitely more acres going into organic production. I think organic for the industry is about 10% now. So 10% of the production is organic and it’s getting more popular because the prices tend to be very stable. A good premium over conventional prices that holds out through most of the year. The only thing is you can’t really start an orchard organically. It’s very difficult because you have a battle of weeds. It’s much easier to take an established orchard that has 70% shading of the ground or more. So it’s less of a battle against the weeds. And then it’ll take three years to convert that orchard into an organic certified Grove. Then you can start selling your fruit. It’s organic. We see some citrus going organic. Certainly there’s quite a few Mandarin varieties up in Ohio that are organic.

There’s lots of lemon. Organic deals seem to be possibly a good way to go, especially if there’s starting to be a little over-supply. The organic lemon market seems to be very stable and as long as people can pay for the extra cultural cost because it does cost more to control the weeds. Plus you have to spray twice. We have a bug called the Asian citrus psyllid. It is one of two vectors of citrus greening disease, which is a bacteria. So we have to spray for the Asian citrus psyllid. When we have organic situations, two organic sprays equal one conventional spray. So we have to spray twice as much because their organic materials only last a very short window. So you have to spray three weeks apart. We do 3 or 4 sprays a year conventionally. So that means 6 to even up to 8 treatments with organic  orchards. So it’s definitely more expensive. We have to make sure that the premium covers the extra costs but I know people make good money with organic lemons and certainly other citrus varieties too.

Paul Ward: I know one kind of farmer who’s got Hass Lamb, Haas and Gem. So he’s got multiple picks throughout the year because they’re all ripe but different times and he’s organic. So he’s got the pickers in the field several times a year.

Mike Mobley: We’ve had a farmer taking care of 52 acres of organic crop up in Carpinteria and it was just unbelievable the production they were getting and the consistent high prices. I mean, it was probably 60 to 70 cents per pound premium over the conventional price and usually between 24,000 and close to 28,000 pounds per acre per year consistently. Absolutely it’s the most incredible place for grownup avocados. The climate is absolutely perfect. The threat of frost is very, very low, but it just seems to be warm enough in the spring time during bloom and just consistent, heavy production. Whereas Ventura County would tend to have more peaks and valleys. One high year followed by a small year. That’s the typical physiology of a Hass or any avocado tree, up and down, alternate bearing as they call it. We actually encourage our growers to pick early. We want to pick almost all the fruit off in January and February before the next year’s crop is set. So that really helps balance out and takes the highs and lows out of the tree production. We have much more consistency and reduction of the alternate bareness by picking early so that when the tree is setting crop, it knows it doesn’t have any fruit on the tree. If it wants to set a heavy crop every year versus if you waited and had a heavy crop and then it goes to set another crop, it’s naturally gonna not want to set a heavy crop if it already is holding heavy crops. So we trick the tree by picking the fruit early. You can only do that by using huge and I mean huge amounts of potassium. We really load up our Hass avocado trees with lots of  potassium. Because you know, avocados have twice the amount of potassium than  say a banana. So we give as much potassium as those trees can hold in January and February. The fruit is already 8, 9, 10 ounces and ready to be picked. It’s got lots of oil. It’s very good eating fruit early like that. We pick it in February, March before next year’s crop is set. That’s like the key to growing avocados. Extra potassium and pick early, you can’t lose. 

Paul Ward: That’s good advice, thank you Mike. How can somebody get a hold of you if they wanted to know more about growth management and they’re thinking about buying a ranch here in Ventura County? 

Mike Mobley: Well, the easiest way would be to go on our website, which is www.prolandman.comprolandman.com. That’s progressive land management, abbreviated prolandman.com. Then my email address is mike@prolandman.com. 

Paul Ward: That sounds good. That’s easy enough. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate you coming on the show. 

Mike Mobley: Anytime it was great. Always good to share time with you, Paul. 

Paul Ward: Likewise, Thank you.

We’d love to hear from you! As always, feel free to email Paul@homeandranchteam.com.