Farming Podcast | Cotton Fertility Timing Trial | XtremeAg

00:00 A cotton fertility challenge with our French Agra liquid. The results are in 00:00:04 and they're gonna surprise you just a little bit. Pretty exciting stuff we're talking about here in extreme ag cutting the curve. 00:00:09 Welcome to Extreme ags Cutting the Curve podcast, where real farmers share real insights and real results to help you improve your farming operation. 00:00:19 And now here's your host, Damien Mason. Hey there. Welcome to another fantastic episode. This is a special episode of Extreme Eyes Cutting the Curve. 00:00:27 We're doing a whole series of these videos with our friends from Agro Liquid. We've got Stephanie Linco here. 00:00:31 If you've paid attention to what we've done, each of the guys hosted a competition on their farms, and they also did multiple trial competitions, if you will, 00:00:41 on their farms with prescriptions for fertility set by the other guys. So at Matt Miles farm, 'cause he's our only cotton pro 00:00:48 or extreme ag, they put in three different competition plots. One was prescribed by Matt since it's his farm. 00:00:56 One was prescribed by Kevin Matthews, one by Kelly Garrett. Neither of those two guys grow cotton, so he assumed 00:01:01 that they obviously are gonna flop. But they had assistance from our friends with agro liquid. The goal was three 00:01:07 and a half bale cotton, which Matt has taught me means 1,750 pounds, and they wanted to do so with a $50 foliar budget. 00:01:17 The results are in, the cotton is harvested. Matt is coming to us here it is October. Uh, the cotton pickers might still be running down there, 00:01:24 but he freed up some time to give this information so that you can learn from it, whether you're a cotton producer or not. 00:01:29 It's all about some of the cool same fundamentals of how to get more with less 00:01:34 and cutting back on your fertility spend, uh, and giving the right, uh, the right nutrients at the right time. 00:01:39 Matt, what'd you find out? Well, I found out it was very much a success. Uh, luckily I didn't lose this year. 00:01:46 Last year in the, in the corn challenge, I lost to Kelly this year. I beat Kelly, but I only beat him by six pounds. 00:01:52 So statistically difference, we were basically the same Six pounds on 1800 pounds. Yeah, six pounds on eight. Yeah, I was 1806. He was 1800. 00:02:04 Yeah. Uh, statistically there's no difference there. But I will tell you this, you know, when we set the three and a half belt, you know, goal, I, I was highly doubtful 00:02:13 that any of any of us would reach it. And we definitely reached it with, with this program. And, uh, you know, we were all, we were all able 00:02:21 to choose out of a portfolio of products and everybody done something a little bit different. Kelly and I was more similar in what we did than, 00:02:28 than what Kevin did. You know, Kevin's gonna go out and do his own thing all the time. So we knew that upfront. 00:02:33 But, uh, you know, all of 'em are really good yields and all of them, I'm pretty, you know, I was, I was very com comfortable with all of them. 00:02:41 Understood. So, uh, you put in three different competitive fields. I don't know how different, okay, you did 1,806 pounds. 00:02:49 That's the result you win. Kelly's 1800 pounds, like you said, not a huge difference on, on that big 00:02:54 of a yield anyway, what was Kevin's number? 1724. Okay, so the fertility, uh, and, and, and Stephanie 00:03:04 and somebody from Agri Liquid oversaw all this. How much did it vary, Stephanie? How big of a difference was there? 00:03:13 Okay, I've got 50 bucks for foliar fertility treatment. How different was it? So the first big, biggest difference was Kevin just took 00:03:23 those dollars and split it into two applications. So only went out twice at the first and third. Um, timing. Kelly, um, chose all four timing. 00:03:33 So he took his total in, split it in four equal parts, put it out four times where Matt made two different programs, one application at the first and third, 00:03:41 and then a different mix for the second and fourth. So they all approach timing differently as far as nutrients. Yeah, you look across, they're pretty similar. 00:03:49 You focused on the big nutrients that cotton likes, potassium, boron, um, all of them included that in one form or another. 00:03:57 Um, but the ratios kind of were a little bit different and their timings were dramatically different. Understood. All right, so a person that's skeptical 00:04:06 and says, well, you know what, maybe you just threw a whole bunch of dry out. You only competition was on the, on the $50 00:04:12 foliar fertility. Uh, did you change your approach with the, uh, preseason and the fertility mix that went in? 00:04:23 Or were they all the same? Matt, Now it it reexplain that. Did you, did everybody get a skeptic, 00:04:32 might look at these numbers and say, well, Matt might have just juiced it ahead of time with a bunch of dry fertility, uh, before the crop went out, 00:04:39 or were all of these plots treated the same with the exception of the foliar, uh, fertility? They Were all treated the same. They 00:04:46 had a base fertility on 'em, you know, I mean, everybody's gonna put a base fertility. It was a ton and a quarter of chicken litter. 00:04:52 And then we do a variable rate potassium application from that. But when we do that, we do know we 00:04:58 reserve enough room there. You know, as, as Stephanie said, potassium was one of the cotton's, one of the biggest users 00:05:04 of potassium there is out there. Uh, I took six uh, tissues in the middle of the year and all of 'em look, all of 'em sucked on potassium. 00:05:11 So, and, and another one that we have a lot of trouble with is calcium. I can't keep a sufficient calcium level in a tissue test 00:05:18 during reproductive stage of cotton. I've never been able to do that. Uh, you can aid to it and you can bandaid it, 00:05:24 but you cannot get enough calcium sufficiently. Go to south, go to south of Dallas where Todd Farms, he's got too much calcium in his tissue sample. 00:05:33 So it just depends on the dirt and where you're at and what's going on. Um, what I tried to do was take my most important nutrients 00:05:40 to a cotton plant and make sure that I have those on all four trips. And then my micro, I split up in between. 00:05:46 But I, I, I relied heavy on potassium and calcium because that's two things that as we've took tissue samples over the years 00:05:54 that we're gonna be, if we're gonna be deficient in two nutrients in a tissue sample, mid-season cotton, those are the two we're gonna be deficient in. 00:06:02 Do you do cotton last year, Stephanie? Is this, I mean, I get it, you cover a lot of ground, but cotton's not your thing. 00:06:09 It's not, you know, and this is the first year with, um, heavy trial work through innovation groups 00:06:14 that we have done cotton. Um, we actually are making a big push towards cotton. So we have a lot of new cotton trials coming out in 00:06:20 the entire southeast. So, you know, Texas through Matt's area that will have a lot of data to build for this coming season. 00:06:26 So agri liquid wants to make a push into cotton country. You did so with this. What'd you learn? 00:06:31 So I learned, um, number one, I think the biggest take home is, you know, Kelly, Kevin don't grow cotton. 00:06:37 You can grow any crop if you know the basics of agronomics. So I think that's, you know, don't be scared by new crops. 00:06:43 Granted, they weren't taking care of it. They just, they just texted their prescription and Matt did it. 00:06:48 So let's not give these guys too much credit. I'm not sure they could still, but from Fertility, like a lot of people freak out 00:06:52 that they don't wanna try a new crop 'cause they don't know what nutrients it needs. You know, all plants need nutrients in general. 00:06:58 Um, just figuring out what those key nutrients are and addressing them, you can fertilize any crop you want. Uh, from this trial I learned, um, that again, there's a lot 00:07:07 of ways to get to that same endpoint. You know, Kelly focused really hard on some of those micros added some additional calcium in 00:07:14 a fulvic acid in, he got to the same point as Matt did at a little bit simpler approach. So I think there's a lot of ways 00:07:20 that you can get to that same endpoint. Um, again, if you know those nutrients that that crop really, really desires. 00:07:26 Well, I, and I do think this and Kevin's defense, uh, you know, and, and, and I looked at the yield map 00:07:33 and the field was almost as, as even as you could be as far as a yield map. You know, I didn't put Kevin in a worse spot. 00:07:39 Now he could have been, you know, one different pass in that field that's in a bad spot that, you know, that that's something you just have to work with and, and, 00:07:47 and hope for the best. But Kevin was actually trying to save money based on piggybacking these into, you know, save trips. 00:07:55 And I think what maybe he didn't realize, uh, with cotton is we're gonna go over it six times. At least six times anyway. 00:08:02 I mean, we, if we'd wanna split this up into six applications, we could have had. Yeah. But you know, he was trying on the other end to say, 00:08:08 okay, we're gonna save $7 an acre on a trip twice that's $14 an acre. And that's just a misconception, you know, 00:08:15 if you're looking at corner beans, that's gonna absolutely happen. But when you're going over cotton, you've got plenty of time 00:08:21 to put whatever you want to out whenever you want to. Valid point right there. So the person listed this, that's a big takeaway. 00:08:26 Yeah. A lot of people listen to this, don't grow cotton, right? They're in Nebraska, whatever. 00:08:30 But the point is, there's times when trip cost is big, uh, what, you know, seven bucks an acre or something like that. 00:08:36 If you're gonna give yourself a return to diesel wear and turn equipment hour, you know, for your hired hand or whatever, you're going across cotton every, 00:08:44 every week or 10 days, right? Yep. About every 10 days we're going over it for plant bugs in our area. 00:08:49 Now there's other areas where it's not as much, but you're still gonna normally get three to five applications on a, on a cotton crop no matter 00:08:56 where you are in the United States. Can you cut back Stephanie on some of the other stuff? He talked about what a ton 00:09:03 and a half of litter and all these things. Do you think that if we're in tight margins, there's still room to be, is there still, 00:09:11 is there still fat to be trimmed? I think you have to look at that overall system approach. Um, you know, you can't just cut back in one area. 00:09:20 You have to figure out which area is the best place to cut back. So it could be, you know, he's already doing things right, 00:09:25 you variable rate his dry out there, that's a place to cut back that you're not over applying on those, you know, higher levels of the field. 00:09:32 Um, I think you just have to kinda look at that and then set that budget. You know, foli years are where people tend to cut back. 00:09:38 Um, and we proved that, you know, putting four applications out really was better than two like Kevin did. 00:09:43 Um, so kind of mix and match those nutrients and set that budget and then look to cut back that way. Uh, you need a good base no matter where you start with, 00:09:52 Well, you've got the good base Damon, and then with a foer, a foer iss not a fix all a foer in my opinion, and, 00:09:59 and Stephanie May disagree, is a bandaid for that point in time. You know, if that plant's needing something at 00:10:04 that point in time, that foer gonna go in there and take care of the problem. Well, if you spoonfeed that, then you take care 00:10:10 of the problem four times instead of twice. So if, if you're taking medicine, they tell you to take it twice daily and you take it once, 00:10:17 you're probably not gonna get the same effect as if you take it twice daily. And it's the same thing with these foyers. 00:10:22 You know, they're not a big, they're not the the haymaker punch. They're, they're the small jab. 00:10:28 And so you're just jabbing at that plant all the time and they don't have to be cotton. We feel the same way about the other crops too. 00:10:34 Now we do limit some of those applications based on, you know, it's hard to go out there and take a foer and just do a specific, you know, application just for that. 00:10:43 So it makes it easier on cotton, but that's what we talk about on corn. You know, most people quit their corn 00:10:49 after tassel, you know, or right there after tassel and there's still a lot of money to be made, right? Same thing with cotton, same thing with soybeans. 00:10:57 You know, it, those later applications of fo your fertilize will give you seed size. You know, it gives you more LT and a bowl of cotton. 00:11:04 So, I mean, you can just keep going. So, you know, that's where I think sometimes we fall short, is we don't finish the crop because we're tired. 00:11:12 We're, we're, we're hitting the easy button and we don't have any money. So I mean, you take those three things together, you know, 00:11:18 it's a lot, a lot of guys will quit. You know, I find myself, you, you have to push yourself to do some of this at the end of the year. 00:11:25 So what do you think the add-on is, Stephanie? Maybe from your perspective, uh, you're not a cotton producer, 00:11:30 but you talk about the fundamentals of agronomics by, by doing that last pass, obviously it needs to pay for itself. 00:11:37 Did it add, is that the difference between 1,724 pounds and 1800 pounds? You know, I think that's hard to determine. 00:11:45 Widespread, you know, weather is gonna play the biggest part. Um, and that's where I tell guys I like those foliar 00:11:50 applications, is it's an opportunity to boost a crop if you have a good season that you're finishing up. 00:11:57 But you can also save money that if it turns hot and dry and you don't think you're gonna get any additional yield 00:12:02 out of that crop, then you can save those dollars and not make that application. May I just pull out my computer 00:12:07 or my calculator right here? I think, are we talking 70 cents? What's a what's a, what's a pound of cut? 00:12:11 I, I just leaned over and done the math. So the difference in Kevin's yield and Kelly's yield Yep. Is $52 and 50 cents. Now 00:12:18 You're doing exactly where I was gonna go, man, you already knew what I was thinking. So I was going 76 pounds. 00:12:23 Let's call you the high end and him and, and low Kevin, the low end. So if Kelly's the average, which I know that yours 00:12:29 and his are really close, 76 pounds, is it 69 cents? What's a pound account? I would Call it 70 cents the rebate from the gin and all. 00:12:35 Okay. It's a little over, it's a little over our total spend. Yeah. So you said $53 and 20 cents. 00:12:41 So if that, I mean, that's the entire spend, right? That's the entire spend right there. And if you're saying that you think the difference, 00:12:48 the difference on that really happened because of that last timed application you can justify even if you weren't going out already, 00:12:57 which you were, because cotton gets sprayed over so many times, you can, you can justify one last pass for 53 bucks. 00:13:05 That, that's right. And I, I'm not gonna sit here and say that the last pass was the most important pass, you know, on a cotton plant when it starts fruiting, 00:13:13 you better have all your nutrients there that it needs because it starts at the bottom, goes to the top and uses the same nutrients from the first bowl it produces 00:13:20 to the last bowl it produces now uses more on the first ones. They're bigger normally they're more, you know, 00:13:25 they've got more value to 'em. But that plant needs that, that nutrition all the time. That's where, where I feel like, 00:13:31 and I may be wrong, that the, the systems approach of of, of splitting applications up, you know, 00:13:38 we do that on our grower standard. We're always putting some type of micro and some type of potassium in that plant all 00:13:44 through its reproductive stage because it's doing the same thing at the bottom as it is at the top. 00:13:49 Corn's gonna make the one here. You know, there are certain times you can dictate a corn plant, you know, depending on when the rows around 00:13:55 or the length and cotton's doing it all day long, you know, every day it's putting on a new bloom or a bowl. 00:14:00 The biggest thing you're trying to stick all those. Um, I, I got one more question staying with you. Okay. People like me from Indiana, 00:14:09 we don't know much about growing cotton. So corn, soybeans, test weight, moisture, foreign material that's in your load. 00:14:17 Uh, obviously if there's some kind of vomit tox and things like that. But in general, those are your quality issues 00:14:23 that either you get paid or you get docked. What are the quality issues that nutrition would matter for in cotton? 00:14:32 I know they talk about fiber length, but that's more varietal or geographical. So what does this foliar, that 1800 pounds, 00:14:40 is it just pounds or is there a quality thing that you could justify being better at your nutrition? Well, you know, a lot of it is varietal, 00:14:49 but the happier you are with the, the happier the plant is, the less stress the the stress the plant has, 00:14:56 it's gonna give its full potential. You know, and cotton is, is based on color, you know, number one is the color. 00:15:02 And that has nothing to do with any kind of fertility other than the fact if you've got big, pretty healthy fluffy bowls, they're gonna tend to be, 00:15:11 you know, nicer color. Uh, I think all those are affected by the nutrients in them. You know, you can see like a dry land corner 00:15:18 or something, you know, where you don't get the irrigation on it. It'll be little naughty bowls that don't fully develop. 00:15:23 Uh, they'll have a dingy color to 'em. So I really think that the, that the nutrients matter through the whole thing. 00:15:29 The thickness of the fiber. The length of the fiber. You know, something we did get in this year is the, the cotton was so good. 00:15:37 The seed, they call it, call it fragile. So we were having seed fragments that are busting up as we're harvesting and getting in the sample. 00:15:44 So that's costing us some money there. But that really has nothing to do with nutrients. It, it's act. And I, I almost think 00:15:50 that the cotton just tried to outdo itself, you know, and, and, and less value went to the seed, 00:15:55 more value went to the land. But I think all those things in combination, and Stephanie May agree or disagree, uh, you know, 00:16:02 a happy plant is gonna produce happy crop. Yeah, I agree completely. And we've always said that She generally agrees. She generally 00:16:11 agrees No, for this case. I agree. You know, if you have a healthy crop, you know it's gonna produce more. 00:16:19 So it just kind of goes back to that overall plant health. Um, whether it comes from nutrition or something else. 00:16:25 That's always gonna produce the better crop in the end. Man. We talked about plant health and, and Kelly's big thing is about plant balance. 00:16:31 And then if you have the right health and you have the right soil and you have the right balance, then you can cut back on things like, uh, pesticides 00:16:36 and fungicides, et cetera. Is that a reality in cotton? 'cause I, I, I know I say this all the time 'cause when the first time I went into a cotton field 00:16:44 and talked to Matt, Matt told me, cotton's a plant that looks to die every day. That's what his old man told him. 00:16:50 So did, did you learn anything about nutrition here that makes it so you can cut back on some of the harsh pesticides and fungicides? 00:16:57 Uh, we did not apply fungicide. The fungicide is not a mandatory thing for cotton like it is for soybeans. 00:17:05 Uh, it actually isn't on corn for us too. I know in the Midwest they've had a tremendous amount of trouble with southern rust. 00:17:11 We get that they've never had it. We get that, but we get it late enough in the season that it really don't affect yield, uh, soybeans. 00:17:17 We're gonna be mandatory fungicide. You know, there's bio pesticides out there that, that, you know, the goal is to, to reduce it. 00:17:26 Now I'm in one of the highest infestation of insects that there is in the world. I think, uh, even when you go southeast over into Georgia 00:17:33 and Alabama and places like that, they don't have the, the, the insect pressure that we have here don't know 00:17:39 what the difference is, but where we spray six times, they may spray three to four. So, you know, the perfect world's gonna be 00:17:46 that we get that reduced. They're, they're working with different things that, you know, will enhance that. 00:17:52 Um, there's a product out there that you can use on soybeans that's, that actually kills the larvae. 00:17:57 Uh, can't remember the name of it. So it's being worked on today's world. If you don't, if you don't spray insecticides, uh, 00:18:04 you're probably not gonna have enough cotton crop to stay in business. Now the, the GMO part of it is where that's really saved us. 00:18:11 You know, a lot of people are anti GMO, but had you rather have tons of pesticides on your crop or would you rather have a genetically modified crop 00:18:19 that you don't have to put 'em on? Yeah. You know, and that's where, and you know, I think they're making more strides there. 00:18:23 We, we pretty much have, have reduced spraying for the cotton bowl worm at all. You know, if you've planted the right gene, 00:18:30 you don't have to worry about it. Our biggest intruder is gonna be plant bugs and then probably aphids would be next. 00:18:37 So, uh, Stephanie by the way, yeah, that's a different, different topic of a different story. But the consumer still believes 00:18:42 that GMO equals more chemistry as opposed to genetically engineered seed traits. Made it so we could reduce chemistry and insecticides. 00:18:50 And a lot of people, that seems to be so the biggest, the biggest marketing mistake ever made by the entire industry 30 years ago, was, 00:18:57 uh, not communicating that. If they'd have gone out with an environmental message, it would've been great. Yeah, 00:19:02 Everybody would love it. Stephanie, um, last thought here. Any, any that surprise you? 00:19:11 Um, I'm, I Don't know if you even knew what three and a half bales was. You know what be like me saying, Hey, 00:19:16 Stephanie on your farm in central Michigan, let's shoot for, uh, let's shoot for 30 bushels soybeans 00:19:20 and see if we can get it done. You're like, do that all day long, Right? Yeah. As I, I 00:19:25 think the yield is probably what surprised me the most because we did set the bar really high. 00:19:29 Like the idea behind this was to get something that maybe wasn't achievable, um, but hope that we would add enough fertility 00:19:36 that we could get closer. So I'm excited for Matt that we were able to actually meet or exceed a little bit that yield goal. 00:19:43 Um, so that probably surprised me the most. Um, is that 100% fertility? Probably not, you know, environment 00:19:49 plays a big role to that. But I like to think that, you know, having a good fertility program helps maintain that yield 00:19:55 and get him to that final spot. I think we're gonna leave it there. So we gonna do this again? 00:20:03 Absolutely. I liked, I liked the idea. I'm learning about cotton. I learned everything I know about cotton. 00:20:08 I've learned because of extreme ag. I, I it's, it's right there, right about uh, uh, about what two pounds of cotton goes into a pair of jeans. 00:20:15 So we're talking about 900 pairs of jeans came out of uh, Matt's plot, right? I mean, 00:20:22 You know those numbers better than I do Anyway, it seems Matt Miles with extreme Ag, she's Stephanie Linco with Agro Liquid. 00:20:31 We've got more of these fertility challenge results coming. This is the first one recording 00:20:34 because you might imagine Cotton was the first one to be completed because Second one we did wheat already. Oh, that's right. 00:20:40 Second one. We did wheat already. 'cause of course if you're still harvesting wheat in October, you got a problem. 00:20:44 So that's right. We've done wheat, we've done, uh, cotton, uh, look for our soybean and our corn. 00:20:49 The corn one's kind of cool 'cause we did both dry land and we did uh, uh, irrigated and on soybeans. I think we did, uh, we talked about double crop versus, 00:20:57 uh, yeah, right. So we've got some really cool stuff. So we really, we've got multiple more results from you. We've got dry land and irrigated corn results 00:21:04 that are gonna be recorded when we get those results in. The combines haven't run yet. 00:21:08 And on soybeans, it's double crop or as our southern French call them wheat beans. And then also standard conventional, uh, growth. 00:21:16 So stay tuned for that. Look at all the cool stuff we've done on the Economic Fertility Challenge with Agro Liquid. 00:21:21 It's a series of, uh, special episodes here at Cutting the Curve. Also look at all the cool videos that guys like Matt 00:21:26 and the other Stream ag guys do out in the field to help you learn. You can go to Extreme ag.farm. 00:21:30 There's a library of videos there, all free categorized by season, by Crop, by, just go there. Extreme ag. Do farm hundreds of videos plus hundreds 00:21:40 of episodes of this show right here. If you like what you're seeing while you're on the website, also click on the Grainery. 00:21:45 That's the show that's shot here at my farm in Indiana with guests just like Stephanie and Matt who have both been here 00:21:50 for episodes of the Grainery. Check it all out. Till next time. Thanks for being here. That's Matt. That's Stephanie. I'm Damien. 00:21:54 This is Extreme Ice Cutting the Curve. That's a wrap for this episode of Cutting the Curve. Make sure to check out Extreme ag.farm 00:22:01 for more great content to help you squeeze more profit out 00:22:05.045 --> 00:22:06.365