Foundational Fumigation

John B. Mueller [00:00:01]:
This podcast supports fumigators in improving safety, compliance and solutions. Always follow the federal fumigant label. State and local laws licensed fumigators are legally responsible for their applications. And now on to all things fumigation. Out here, we don’t just fight pests, we outsmart them. This is All Things Fumigation, where applied science meets real world grit. I’m John B. Mueller, a fumigator by trade and your guide to the science of fumigation done right. Each month we saddle up with the people, the practices and the precision it takes to keep facilities safe, compliant and pest free. Because when you’re in the trenches of pest, you don’t need magic, you need science and maybe a little cowboy spirit. Smarter solutions, safer practices, managed costs. Welcome to All Things Fumigation. Welcome to the second episode of our podcast and welcome back, Kayla.

Kayla Schmidt [00:01:26]:
Yes, welcome everybody. Thank you, John. Here we are going to. In this episode we are going to cover the broader message of the market of post harvest fumigation where this commodity protection and food safety tool provides its efficacy.

John B. Mueller [00:01:44]:
Perfect. Yeah. And you know, in the last episode we discussed how these groups, you know, have very different views of fumigation, but both depend on fumigation, you know, so what we want to do is dig in a little bit deeper into this post harvest kind of spectrum. And to me this is exciting. This is where I’ve spent my life. So, so.

Kayla Schmidt [00:02:05]:
Very exciting. So just so we understand the overall fumigation market, there’s different segments that I don’t know, people are aware of. So can you explain and dive into the different fumigation markets that are out there so our listeners have a better idea of when you talk about certain things where, where they apply.

John B. Mueller [00:02:21]:
Yeah, so. So where is fumigation applied is the question. And if we, if we zoom out away first as we dig deeper, if we zoom out from post harvest and look at all fumigation markets, really the first one that people see when they’re on vacation and they’re in south Florida or South Texas or Southern California, they see these tented houses, My wife calls them bouncy houses. And that is a structural fumigation market. They’re targeting drywood, termites, there’s food, stored product. Pests aren’t even a target there. And it’s a very important service provides fumigants, provide a very important space there because these insects are destroying wood and destroying these homes.

Kayla Schmidt [00:03:08]:
It’s a big market.

John B. Mueller [00:03:09]:
It is a big market, but it’s very niche. But it’s also Extremely different from post harvest. The second fumigant market is soil fumigation or pre plant fumigation. So before the crops are planted, sometimes fruit, sometimes nuts, sometimes vegetables, many times vegetables. So they’re treating the soil before planting. So pre plant. Then we come into the post harvest space. And then post harvest space has kind of bled into a fourth market which is using gases for remediation of human pathogens and microbial issues in food processing operations. And we started to get into this about 20 years ago or so and it’s really started to gain traction over the years. So this one’s been an interesting one. And really the attributes of fumigants, if you think about it, they carry through all four of these markets. Right. They’re mobile, they’re non selective, they’re fast and they’re extremely effective. So it’s an interesting one to go from macro pests into microbes. And yeah, it’s been a journey.

Kayla Schmidt [00:04:22]:
So I know as we work together, the first two that you talked about, the first two segments markets didn’t apply to us as much as the commodity fumigation. So whenever you talk about commodity fumigation post harvest, can you give the listeners an example of the type of products you’re talking about? Like when you refer to commodity fumigation, you’re talking about grain.

John B. Mueller [00:04:44]:
Yeah. When we’re talking about commodity fumigation, we’re talking about bulk commodities like wheat is a very popular one, rice obviously corn to a lesser degree, and soybeans to a lesser degree yet again. So sometimes we think about fumigation of those commodities and then we get into specialty commodities like tree nuts and peanuts. We get into spices, insects love spices, cocoa.

Kayla Schmidt [00:05:13]:
And I know we’re going to get into some of this later, but I just wanted to give our listeners an idea. When you refer to commodity, we know what that means, but just so we’re clear for everybody else.

John B. Mueller [00:05:22]:
Yeah, so yeah, it’s a good point though. But it is more than just the major grains, so.

Kayla Schmidt [00:05:30]:
And then the fourth one you mentioned was the antimicrobial, which is so interesting to me. So as I started getting into this market, this was starting. So can you explain more for those that don’t know about the antimicrobial market?

John B. Mueller [00:05:42]:
Yeah, so cleaning is very similar to what we talked about before in the food safety side of the industry as far as post harvest and macro pests, you know, cleaning is number one. Well, in the microbial side, this is cleaning on steroids.

Kayla Schmidt [00:06:01]:
Yes.

John B. Mueller [00:06:02]:
So the interesting thing, and there’ll be A whole podcast based around this. But the fact of the matter is human pathogens kill. Salmonella, salmonella, listeria, E. Coli, they kill and they’re very serious. If you look at the newspaper, every day we see recalls every single day. But fumigants can get in where hands can’t get into, where water can’t get to, where even fogging material can’t get to, and these gases can get into these really, really tight spaces. Now they’re different fumigants for the antimicrobial side. And again, that’s for another podcast. It’s interesting though, but it also highlights the potency of fumigants. They transcend just the macro pests. But now we’re starting to see the value in the micro side too. So it’s exciting too.

Kayla Schmidt [00:06:52]:
Yeah, it’s the mobile in the first episode. For those that missed it, go back and listen to the first episode to get a base here. But back in the first episod you talked about the mobility as such a positive about fumigants. And I think, you know, when it comes to microbials, that mobility that it has is huge for it. So hopefully we will hear more about that in future, future podcasts. But let’s get to the back to the Post Harvest for better understanding and let’s make it clear to our listeners that the purpose of this podcast is to focus on the commercial services of Post Harvest. So highlight commercial services of Post Harvest here. Right?

John B. Mueller [00:07:28]:
Yeah. So we are going to focus on Post Harvest, but I’m going to lowlight the commercial service comment. Kayla’s needling me a little bit here. So I don’t look at fumigation as a commercial service because commercial services are routed services and fumigation. Yeah, fumigation is not a routed service. It’s definitely more of an event based service. So there’s a tremendous amount of effort and equipment that goes into shifting. These are plant shutdowns. There’s. The effort involved with, with some of these fumigations is just huge. And so I mean, it is more of an industrial service. You know, it’s interesting that I say that, but it is a reality. It’s less of a commercial service, it’s event based, it’s not routed. It’s really more of an industrial event.

Kayla Schmidt [00:08:20]:
And that does make sense because you don’t. It’s not something to take lightly. There’s a lot of safety that goes behind it, a lot of planning money for the budgets that maybe wasn’t there originally. So they do occur seasonally and during weekends and holidays. I know being family, that would dictate sometimes what 4th of July looked like or Thanksgiving looked like, as that would sometimes mean being at a fumigation and not necessarily sitting around a table.

John B. Mueller [00:08:46]:
And very seasonal too. My wife referred to herself as a fumigation widow. So she basically, I left on Memorial Day before Memorial Day weekend and came home sometime shortly after Thanksgiving.

Kayla Schmidt [00:08:57]:
Yes, yes. Busy time of year when the pests are out. So, John, in our past careers, you and I would talk about fumigation, marketing, the different categories of post harvest, which we touched on a little bit earlier. Can you break these down and help our viewers and listeners understand this a little better? The different sectors?

John B. Mueller [00:09:16]:
Yeah. So I always think of post harvest in five different categories, or I refer to it from an agrarian standpoint as silos. Right. Industry silos, you know, grain we’ve talked about. We broke that down with the major grains. There’s specialty products like tobacco and tree nuts and things like that. I think of that as one silo, flour milling as another, or I should say milling as another one, because that’s fractionalizing those products, especially those major grains. You know, milling is not just flour milling. There’s rice milling, there’s feed milling. There’s many other starting to grow really as a market. So that’s fractionalizing these grains. And what happens at that point is we’re exposing the part of these grains and seeds that the insects like. So it becomes tough at that point. And then the next silo would be food processing. And that’s I, you know, most people think of that as the more the finished food processing. They think of it as the branded and packaged, eventual packaged foods. And then the last and the fifth silo would be import export. So when we think of these, there’s real differences in how they value and view fumigants. And we’ve talked about this a little bit, but we do want to kind of frame it up in an organized way.

Kayla Schmidt [00:10:35]:
Now, John, I have heard you talk about fumigation being a tool in the IPM toolbox. Can you explain this metaphor a little bit to everybody?

John B. Mueller [00:10:44]:
Yeah, it’s a big hammer, right? So if we really kind of take a look at food processors versus commodity managers. Food processors have a lot of tools in that toolbox. And you’ve heard it, you’re gonna hear it more. There is no substitute for cleaning. Cleaning is the best pest management tool. We’ve talked a little bit about food processors who can wet wash water washes a lot of sins away. Food processors can have CIP and COP cleaning. So they’ll stand for, you know, clean in place, clean out of place. They can use pheromones strategically to help them understand where insects are in their facility and then use that to direct cleaning. And then once they start to see insect pressure and presence, they can deploy things like crack and crevice residual applications. If it scales up a little bit, they’ve got options of surface applications and broader use of those residuals. And then if they really, if those pests really start to increase, there’s fogging and then even heat as an option, as a larger tool. But when you compare and contrast all the tools that a food processing operation, a milling operation has, by comparison to these commodity managers, they just don’t have most of those tools and they definitely can’t be leveraged like food processors do. These commodity managers really depend on fumigants to manage their pests because of the static density and the difficulty in accessing those pests in those dense materials. And like we said earlier on the earlier slide, sometimes they don’t have a choice. If you consider the import exporter, you know, kind of after the commodity manager, these are conditions of sale, sometimes from the buyer, but many times because of quarantine issues, it’s USDA or foreign Department of Agricultures that require fumigation for these commodities upon export, or in the case of the United States, upon import.

Kayla Schmidt [00:12:51]:
And it’s different everywhere you go.

John B. Mueller [00:12:53]:
It absolutely is. In those instances for import export, the pests can change quite a bit off of those dirty dozen that we talk about so much.

Kayla Schmidt [00:13:04]:
And with all of the variety of sectors of fumigation, the markets of fumigation, the science behind fumigation, there has got to be challenges that you have been faced with, I know, but especially and specifically in the post harvest sector. So can you mention some of those challenges to maybe allow others to just agree with you and understand where you’re coming from and your experience here?

John B. Mueller [00:13:29]:
Yeah, yeah. No, thank you for the question. It’s a loaded question, right? What are those challenges and these. We’re setting up future episodes here with some of these. There’s a lot. But I’m just going to go top of mind is, you know, false expectation of 100%, 100% efficacy in the field. It’s, it’s unrealistic. But it’s our job as fumigators to drive that efficacy as high as possible.

Kayla Schmidt [00:13:55]:
It’s your goal. You have to have a goal.

John B. Mueller [00:13:56]:
Absolutely, absolutely. And you’ve got to constantly, you know, improve and drive performance. So 100% efficacy is something that plague us. If we allow those comments to go without some context, I think it sets us up for failure. I think following the science behind fumigation is critical because that’s what we’re going to lean into to drive higher efficacy rates, which is what the customer wants. Lack of effective gas monitoring and diligence in gas monitoring, again, that’s the driver for performance. We have to be able to pull those analytics and look at what the performance was. And if we see dings in the expectation, we can go back and analyze that. And then the other one, which is a big one, is just using the wrong tool to solve some of the pest hemorrhages that some of these facilities get into and using the wrong tool and waiting too long.

Kayla Schmidt [00:14:54]:
So, like, what would. In the fumigation world, what would a potentially wrong tool be?

John B. Mueller [00:15:02]:
I think what I see a lot is when a food processor. Excuse me, when a pest control company who doesn’t have the resources, they don’t fumigate, they’ll try to throw all the other tools at a problem as it escalates.

Kayla Schmidt [00:15:17]:
That maybe they have at their hand their disposal.

John B. Mueller [00:15:19]:
Exactly. And they’ll escalate all the way up to fogging, which they generally have the ability to do. And maybe a fumigation is warranted. And they’ll fog. And they’ll fog. And they’ll fog. And pest populations increase. The fog will only last for so long.

Kayla Schmidt [00:15:35]:
Kill only certain stages.

John B. Mueller [00:15:36]:
Yeah. Sometimes chase them into harborages and places that fog is at a disadvantage. The fogging compound is a disadvantage. And then when the fumigator is finally brought in, the pest populations are so high explode that it’s difficult to really drive the performance that’s expected. The fumigants are brought in as a miracle worker. And they’re not miracle workers. They’re science. And science that has to be followed.

Kayla Schmidt [00:16:04]:
Hence the science cowboy that you’ve talked about in previous episodes. Yes, we are at the point where my grandfather Albert, John’s dad, would say, all good things must come to an end. So this is the end of all things. Fumigation Part 2, Episode 2. And there’s much more that’s gonna be covered in future episodes. So we hope you listen in. We hope, and I believe we did, but we hope that you found this as a good foundation for your knowledge, information, educational platform in regards to fumigation. So if you liked what you heard and you want to hear more, subscribe to us on any podcast in YouTube. Click. Make sure you like us so you can know when the next episode goes comes out. Visit us on LinkedIn. Go to our website, thefumeco.com or you can even email this science cowboy, John Mueller, @thefumeco.com and, you know, I do.

John B. Mueller [00:16:58]:
Want to emphasize LinkedIn. We’ve got some great discussions going on on that platform. We’ve got some challenges. We’ve got some challenges throw out there that’s absolutely awesome against how we learn. So, you know, we do want you to give us your feedback. You know, LinkedIn is a great way to do that, to help us build that content. There’s some incredibly skilled science cowboys out there. So give us that, that feedback. We want to learn from you, and together, we’ll make fumigation a stronger tool. I’m John B. Mueller, and this is all things fumigation. It.