In 1988, Chris Trump's family took over a 800-acre macadamia nut farm in Hawaii. Chris had grown up farming a variety of crops and livestock using conventional and organic farming methods—and, on this farm, Chris learned the in’s and out’s.
One of the biggest obstacles in their macadamia nut farm was the cost of importing herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers to Hawaii. The cost of shipping was stripping their revenue.
In 2005, the Trump farm suffered an infestation of a green stink bug that led to an 80% crop failure. The Trumps were desperate for a solution to save their family farm and recoup their losses. They had to sell all of their farm equipment, they were going to lose their house as collateral and had to lay off all of their employees. Chris’ family was able to buy back a few pieces of equipment with the crop insurance check they received and rehire a skeleton crew. Before the stink bug infestation, half of the trees were conventionally farmed and half were organic. Since the conventionally farmed trees were more profitable they just focused on the conventional trees, they let the organic trees go fallow.
Chris heard about a Natural Farming seminar being held in Hawaii, so he went. The Korean Natural Farming (KNF) techniques were completely the opposite of conventional methods. For example, they recommended uprooting a tree that you would transplant, cut down the taproot and let the tree dry out a few days before replanting. The solutions seemed radical, and Chris had observed nature enough to know that they just might work.
Chris started on his Natural Farming journey. He experimented using inputs and solutions on a small portion of the diseased trees in his families orchard. The results were astounding. The trees would typically be counted a loss in conventional agriculture as we don't have a method for remediating this type of disease, however with the application of Natural Farming methods we experienced recovery of the diseased trees and they eventually thrived.
After tasting success, the Trump family switched all of their organic macadamia nut orchards into Natural Farming methods.
Before, their organic trees were yellowed and not performing as well as their conventionally farmed trees. Once they started using Natural Farming methods, those same trees started to outperform conventional methods. Macadamia nut trees that would usually be cut down because they were diseased and unable to recover, were thriving and producing abundantly. Natural Farming solutions changed the fate of the Trump farm.
Natural Farming enabled the Trump macadamia nut farm to become certified organic for about half the price of traditional organic inputs.
Chris Trump is the first person to use Natural Farming techniques on a large-scale farm, and has since been hired by farms around the world to teach, advise, consult, and implement Natural Farming Solutions across all types of farming. Learn more here.
Chris has created an advanced iteration of liquid IMO (indigenous microorganisms) fertilizer, and has perfected Natural Farming inputs and solutions so that they are incredibly effective and adaptable across geographies and regions.