Julia and Brian, thank you for your responses.

I had not done the numbers that you put together Brian. They would definitely take some achieving and maintaining.

It is a relatively high biological input situation. We use compost and a lot of biological input through the irrigation. It is an orchard situation, so we have plenty of opportunity to get product in. We produce virtually everything on site, so it does not become an overly expensive operation. Our costs per acre are lower than the more conventional orchards in the region.

We keep the soil covered with growing plants 12 months of the year, so that helps greatly with carbon buildup.

I have made contact with the testing lab to see if anything has changed with their testing. I have had no response as yet.

My understanding is that they test for carbon and then multiply that by 1.75 to come up with an organic matter figure. That number always has the potential to be suspect. We should probably only be talking about carbon and not organic matter.