January 19, 2022
On a foggy morning at the Santa Ana Ranch CIG Project farmer, Tom Willey, met with John Petrosso, the Sales Engineer for Mazzei Injector Company to plan a study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of Mazzei's air injection equipment as a possible means for increasing oxygen availability for soil microrganisms and thereby get higher vegetable crop yields. The air injection technique has had positive results in a variety of earlier studies with vegetables, but has not taken off as a mainstream practice of vegetable farmers to date. Foster and Willey are particularly keen to see if air injection might overcome some of the yield declines that they've been seeing in recent years as Phil's farm has tried to rely on less and less soil disturbance with tillage implements. The project has been in the planning stages for several months and is now shaping up in terms of more detailed field implementation. The study crop in 2022 at Foster's farm will be peppers. Three articles describing previous work on the air injection technique as well as a short video withPetrosso's prediction for what will be seen in 2022 are available below. The 56-second video is also available at
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