"You've Got the Highest Wheat Yield in the County"

Interview with Ag Consultant Gary Reding

and HCT Principal Todd Eden

June 24, 2025

Todd Eden 

Gary, you're on audio and video recording and I want to thank you for doing this. For not only me, but also for the industry. We've (HCT) been on a journey. How long have you been working with us?

Gary Reding 

Two years at least.

Todd Eden 

The original skepticism was extremely high wasn't it?

Gary Reding 

For such little quantities, the impact is kind of difficult to believe as a first time witness.

We were using sulfuric acid before and they were bringing it in by the tanker load. And now they bring in drums of WaterSOLV™.

It's hard to believe that such a minuscule amount can have that kind of an effect; which it seems to be having on the plants themselves and hopefully, the disease.

We've just started tracking the disease data points and it's trending in the right direction so we're looking forward to seeing how far it can go.

Todd Eden  

Awesome. I think what brought you to us was a dry land and irrigation farmer in Kansas, right?

Gary Reding 

Correct.

Todd Eden   

And you were doing tissue analysis for him?

Gary Reding 

SAP analysis, which is slightly different from tissue analysis, where they analyze the SAP instead of the tissue itself. It was for a winter wheat field and he had taken the early spring sampling, and he had some of the best SAP samples I'd seen in the Western plains.

I was pretty impressed and told him ‘You're getting your trace elements in and the calcium's going in. Things are looking pretty good on this wheat.’ He said it looked great too.

I always like to take a sample two to three weeks apart on a wheat crop coming out of dormancy, so he sent another sample about a month later. And his numbers had dropped considerably. He wasn't getting nutrients into the plant that he had been. And he was below the average of what I see in the Western plains on their wheat fields.

So I called him up to ask what happened. Something's gone wrong that you're not getting the nutrient uptake into the wheat plant;

what have you done differently since the last sample you took?

He said, ‘Well, I had been treating my water, but I ran out of treatment about two rounds of the irrigation pivot prior to taking the second sample.’ So I asked what he had been treating the water with? And he told me about this WaterSOLV™ stuff. He briefly described it as a combination of acids and bacterial control.

I said, are you planning on putting it back in? And he said, ‘Yep, it just got delivered today. I'm gonna hook it up to the irrigation tomorrow.’

So I said, well, hook it up and run that pivot two more times; because he skipped 2 cycles of the pivot before the 2nd sample. I said run the pivot two more times as needed, not before, and let's see what your SAP samples look like after that. He did just that, and when we got the second, the third set in those numbers came up to about 60% of where they were across the board. I was pretty impressed with that.

Then he went through the season and sampled again, and the numbers stayed up there. But they never got back to where they were at the very, very beginning.

So I said, well, let's track and see how your quality of the grain, because your nutrients are more balanced than the average wheat that I see out there. 

It was a pretty tough year. It was a drought year and hot and dry, so he didn't get his optimal yield that he was hoping for. But then the adjuster came out and said,

'I don't know what you did to your wheat, but you got the highest yield in the county.'

And then the real kicker was when he took it to the miller, the miller called him up and said, ‘What in the world did you do to your wheat? It’s protein is so high!’ because he was running a 19% protein on Durham wheat, organic now, mind you too.

And he said, “I haven't seen 19% protein wheat in years. Normally it'll run 12/13. They get a bonus anything over 12 or 13, they'll get a bonus on their quality for their pay’.

Well, he got a pretty decent bonus on his 19%,

so that helped him out, and that piqued my interest in it.

So I tracked him the next year.

He did a soybean field the next year and a wheat field,

and we saw some similar results.

I did a pecan grower down in New Mexico. They did a trial and 50% of his pecan grove was treated, 50% was not. He had a potential premium for nut quality as well as a problem with insect and disease getting into the nuts. He treated half his flood irrigation water, no pivot. So I thought that was interesting, especially since he knew how much water was coming through his flood gates.

He just kind of ‘dribbled in’ so many parts per million; just opened the valve a little bit and counted the drops or whatever. However he did it, he did it right and he ended up getting a premium for his pecans and was able to sell those pecans to a specialty pecan candy company. He was regenerative, not organic.

So from there I started looking at different clients that I have because almost everywhere I go irrigation water is probably one of the biggest challenges. You have your soil issues and a lot of people will balance their soils and then we do foliage sprays and things like that for trace elements.

But if you've got terrible water, the trace elements In your foliar sprays, even your pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, they don't work as well with poor quality water. I have clients in multiple states. I’ve covered 10 states in Ontario, Canada for four years. And most people have some issue with water. And if we can get the water cleared up, then their plants grow better and their applications are more effective.

Todd Eden 

I think your next big deal was down in Florida.

Gary Reding  

Yes, citrus nurseries, that's a high value crop. There's several citrus nurseries down there that I'm talking to now. They have issues in the Groves. Bacterial canker is almost everywhere and it is a big issue in nurseries. They have to pull the plants out and discard them. So any plant that has one spot of canker gets discarded, and the cost adds up.

We started working on nutrition first. I sampled the water and found out they had some pretty hard water, very hard water. Bicarbonate's well over 300, some sodium and some chloride issues, depending on the well.

I got them started on sulfuric acid before I knew about WaterSOLV™ and that had changed their nursery considerably. It grew better. It removed a lot of the water spots, but it still wasn't getting the nutrients into the plant like I'd like to see.

So I suggested WaterSOLV™ after I saw the results in Kansas and New Mexico and I thought, well, maybe it'll work down here in Florida.They had to go all or nothing because all of their irrigation system complications meant they had to do the whole farm. They went ahead and bit the bullet and did that and the trees started growing quite rapidly and you could see the water spots on the old leaves. The new leaves were cleaned and you know you could see a line right across the the nursery trees. So that accomplished that goal and we were hoping for getting the bacterial canker under control.

I thought the best way we can measure this

is counting the number of trees that they were discarding.

I've been charting that since December

and it's trending downward.

We don't see the high spikes like we used to see

and the overall trend is on the low side now.

So their costs are going down.

Todd Eden 

And can you attribute that to anything specific?

Gary Reding 

I think it’s the bacterial control product, the WaterSOLV™ BC that works on gram negative bacteria. Most of these pathogenic bacteria are gram negative, so I think that helps. One of the other reasons we went this route was the potting mix. The bottom third of the soil was chronically anaerobic because roots would not penetrate into the bottom third of whatever sized pot, and this nursery has pots from 1 gallon all the way up to 90. The bottom third was always the super saturated anaerobic, just black muck slime. And that presents itself with a lot of root disease issues.

Pathogenic microbes are in sick soil, so once we started treating with WaterSOLV™, that's one of the very first things we saw; remediated soil after an average of 3 months of treatment through their irrigation system.

They would have full root balls all the way to the bottom with no anaerobic zone in the bottom of the pots!

That in itself was pretty impressive. The customer said that alone would be justification. But in addition his plants started growing even more rapidly than they did when they got on the sulfuric acid.

So quality of water is paramount in plant health. If you've got all the bicarbonates, they are the main enemies. But then, if you have sodium and chloride, that just compounds the bicarbonate issue.

We know that in anaerobic soil you have anaerobic microbes which are toxic, they produce biofilms. I've even seen formaldehyde out in the fields. On wet soil you can see a little oil slick in the tractor tracks after a rain or footprint. All you have to do is dig up a little bit and you can smell formaldehyde.We had that on my farm back in Indiana because I farmed for 30 years first and I didn't know anything about any of this stuff back then, but that was my poorest performing field where I had that anaerobic zone.

Todd Eden  

We got an extensive total soil analysis. We looked at water hardness, pH, bacterial loading etc. We said you needed X amount of medicine to treat the water, but you're going to need X amount of medicine to treat soils. This is the remediation phase. Once the soils are remediated, we don't need that much chemistry for it, right? We just need to treat the water.

Gary Reding  

All right.

Todd Eden   

In this particular scenario the product did a lot of things, but it also caused a few problems with spotting and through the assessment we started to open up some piping and found a lot of scale and algae and bacteria. The piping was not as clean as the client thought. So we made some adjustments and it took a little while to recover from the spotting that occurred.

And then there comes a point that you say ‘well, my soils are looking good, so I've achieved my remediation. My pipes are clean, my soils are clean, everything's working well. So now I really just need to treat the water and then maybe some compensation for whatever nutrients I'm adding.’

Gary Reding   

Mm hmm.

Todd Eden  

And so, at what point do you guys determine that they’ve put enough medicine of this product on the soils that now we can start turning it down?

Gary Reding 

On a soil farm or farming in the soil, I would say I go back to doing the testing again to find out what's left in your soil; what still may be tied up in the soil or what has been liberated in the soil through the WaterSOLV™ chemistry. I also use the SAP analysis as my final soil test because that's what the plant can actually take up.

With the potting mix situation, you've got new potting mix coming in all the time. I mean 10 semi loads a week. So you're coming in with a starting point, but thereafter the plants have been there for anywhere from three months to five years depending on the size of the plant, you got many different spectrums of soil, so we're having to shoot for an average on the treatment. We're also looking at the efficacy of the products we're applying for nutrition and/or pesticides.

As that gets better, and the water spots on the leaves get better, then we can reduce the the input into the water system, but we've always got to leave a remediation level in that ponded situation because you’ve got new soil coming in and that can vary quite a bit with the different peats that they use, the barks, and whatever else that they put in there.

Todd Eden   

That's amazing because you're doing a quantitative analysis based on SAP to soil to treating water for soil to achieve SAP. That's priceless.

Gary Reding 

I used those as indicators; the SAP as indicators and with that particular operation, the plants are moving so fast sometimes through there that I can't take many SAP tests. I have to go for older trees. So then I have to go back and pick some younger leaves or younger trees and go from there and dial it in.

We're probably using more than is prescribed just because we see the results on the leaves.

The spots on the leaves and the growth rate of the plants, and trying to get the nutrients figured out as well. They have 50 some varieties of citrus plus all kinds of fruit trees, which all have different nutrient demands but it's all fertigated through the same system. So we're shooting for the average and that's tough in that situation. If I get a field of corn or wheat or pecans, or blueberries or whatever; that's all the same crop. You can dial this thing in pretty closely.

Todd Eden 

Did you have any notable observations of the resulting fruit?

Gary Reding 

Well, this is what you run into when you don't do a controlled study and opt to go all in. It was just a phenomenal year for the nursery this year because whether it was, from stone fruit to citrus; just everything blossomed unbelievably.

I've been treating the water and applying different nutrient ratios of different elements that I find and cutting back on the elements that are too strong, mostly nitrogen and potassium at the wrong times. Phosphorus is usually too strong, too.

Going back to the field crops, a lot of times you'll have high phosphorus in the soil, but the plant won't be able to take it up. And that's one of the things I did see, sulfur and calcium would move when we treated the soil on the row crops. So we're doing a lot of things to stimulate more blossom and more fruiting and that sort of thing because the tree sells better if it's got a little fruit hanging on it.

That whole place was just wonderfully selling this spring.There's a few mature fruits in there on the older trees, but especially this year they had a customer come in and buy all of their 45 and 90 gallon trees that they had in stock.

Visually the rate of growth has gone up considerably as well. They were to the point where they were full up because they pot up as they grow.

So the growth was happening

quite quickly all of a sudden.

I think it was May when they told me that they'd already sold 50% more trees than they ever had this time of the year and any year prior in 30 years of operating.

There were some issues with some extra spots coming on after we started treating it, and we realized it was because of what was in the water lines and just getting adjusted to the right parts per million. We had to shoot a little higher to get the results at the beginning than what was prescribed. Now we're dialing it back down again.

Yeah, they knew they always had some problems because a lot of their sensors were becoming calcified or developing slime buildup, so they knew they had bacteria in them. There are four wells on the same farm and each well was slightly different. So we had to do a combination because we're getting water from all of them, and each well has its own application rate and pumps. That took a little finesse to get that dialed in.

This is a tropical climate with both indoor greenhouse and outdoor acreage and they're getting more and more acres outside.They're just putting in another 10 acres of potted plants outdoors.

Todd Eden

Well Gary your time is priceless and appreciated. Your work is priceless and appreciated.

Gary Reding 

Well, so far so good where I've used it, it seems like it's doing some good and people are happy with it. And you know, I've always considered water to be one of my biggest nemesis in consulting because If you got hard water, it makes everything else harder to work with.

End of interview

Gary Reding, Principal, Cascades Consulting, LLC, Ft. Collins, CO, has been in the agriculture industry for 31 years and is currently consulting in plant and soil health with a goal of improving world health, one farm at a time. He works with many crops multiple states and has experience with fruits, vegetables, grains, forages, livestock, hemp and cannabis production models.

HCT's purpose and privilege is providing sustainable and cost effective solutions to the chronic problems of water that plague wells, soil and vegetation. We consistently reduce water demand 15% and increase crop yields 18% and more. When you treat water ‘well’ with WaterSOLV™ you increase efficiency, decrease costs, increase yield, improve pore space and add oxygen chemically. We can show you how to restore soil infiltration and soil operability just by treating your water and for substantially less than you're spending now.

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