Cotton Foliar ROI: $50 Budget Fertility Trial | XtremeAg

00:00:00 Welcome to Extreme ags Cutting the Curve podcast, where real farmers share real insights and real results to help you improve your farming operation. 00:00:09 And now here's your host, Damien Mason. Three and a half bales of cotton per acre on a $50 budget for foliar nutrition. 00:00:20 That's the economic fertility challenge that the guys with extreme ag embarked upon with our friends at Agro Liquid. 00:00:27 It was done at Matt Miles farm. He's the only cotton producer in our group. But each of our guys, well, several of our guys teamed up 00:00:34 with a representative from Agro Liquid to put together their prescription. We, we'll tell you how it's going 00:00:40 and what we think you can learn from it. Even if you don't produce cotton, this is always valuable because we are headed into a situation in our any situation 00:00:49 with low commodity prices. And you really need to look at your nutritional expenditures. 00:00:55 What are you doing out there for plant nutrition and how can you make every bang for your buck possible? That's what we're talking about. Matt Miles, 00:01:02 you hosted this, you did this. Uh, what do you think? Well, you know, coming off of last year when these northern guys come down here in my own backyard 00:01:16 and beat me in the corn challenge, you know, I kind of had mixed emotions about that. Should they beat me in a corn challenge? Yes, probably so. 00:01:24 'cause I've been growing corn when I was a baby, but should they beat me in my own backyard on a corn challenge when I'm supposed to know my soils? 00:01:31 Maybe not. So I was behind the eight ball of this thing from the beginning. Cotton is kind of where I came from, 00:01:39 so I'm a little more confident this year than I was last year. All right. So Kevin Matthews, Kelly Garrett, 00:01:45 the two extreme ag guys that also, uh, did a, uh, experiment with you and they teamed up with people from agri liquid 00:01:52 experts as they were Gabe Saxon, Stephanie Linco, and one other. We've got them here. 00:01:58 Uh, Stephanie, this is kind of a, a, a cool thing that you do. Economic fertility challenge you done on corn, 00:02:04 soybeans, cotton, wheat. And we're tracking all this spend. And obviously it's a time when 00:02:11 economically we're talking about how can we cut back on fertility spend and put it right place, right 00:02:17 time when it needs to be there. And also environmentally, uh, I think that the timing of this kind of thing is absolutely perfect 00:02:23 because of where we're with the economics and the environmental pressure using fertility throughout the season. 00:02:30 We talk about spoon feeding, all that kind of stuff. Is that what these folks did? Is that what the prescriptions looked like? 00:02:36 They did and everybody took a little different approach, uh, to how they addressed it. 00:02:40 Um, so you know, Matt and his home team, you know, they know what they're doing. You know, we, um, had two guys 00:02:49 that are in cotton growing areas that knew how to divide it up. They came up with two fidelity programs and alternated them. 00:02:55 Uh, we did a total of four applications. So they did one treatment on application one and three and something different on two 00:03:02 and four, um, where Kelly was teamed up with me. Um, we just made one mix and said, split it up four times and put it out there. 00:03:11 Uh, where Kevin's team, uh, came up with the same mix, but they want to go a little bit heavier each application. So they said, okay, split it in half. 00:03:19 Do it at the first timing and at the third timing and that's it. So everyone took the spoonfeed 00:03:24 approach a little bit differently. Um, and they took what they're putting out as far as nutrients a little bit differently. 00:03:30 So it's gonna be interesting to see. 'cause there's a lot of variables, um, to know which one was the right approach. 00:03:35 Kevin, have you ever grown cotton? Nope. So you feel like this is the best way to do it? Have, have Matt do it 00:03:43 and you just, uh, uh, send him a text with, uh, what the prescription's supposed to be? Well, I, I thought when I went 00:03:50 to his field day, I had this deal worked out. I, I pulled a scalp to the side and that, uh, 00:03:56 made the decisions when stuff was gonna be applied, offer a little bit of extra incentive under the table to make sure 00:04:04 that mine got applied correctly. And, you know, if there's one of those got left out, it wasn't no big deal. 00:04:09 It just, accidents happened. But, uh, anyhow, that didn't go over. Good. Matt pays her too. Well. 00:04:14 She's pretty loyal, but, uh, anyhow, we tried, but you know, one thing we looked at Damien was in, in this environment, we only had, uh, what do we have $50 00:04:25 to spend on this, I believe? Yeah, 50 bucks an and, um, You know, we got, I think within a penny of spending that 50 bucks, we tried 00:04:32 to get every penny of it we could get. But also the reason for the two trips over to three was looking at the economics of it. 00:04:40 Can we, can we do it? It's a good way to learn from that. Can we do this with two trips 00:04:47 and cut out a spraying cost possibly, or is it going to take three and is three gonna be more of a normal? 00:04:54 Mm-hmm. And you know, if, if I'm not gonna grow cotton in the future, Matt is, if there's something that we can throw in there looking at a 00:05:01 different angle, can this give Matt a edge to maybe cut the cost 10 or $15 acre or $5 an acre? I don't know. It, it was a challenge. 00:05:10 It was really odd for me. It was outta my area of, uh, it was very, uh, not a normal situation for me, but, uh, enjoyed the challenge. 00:05:20 Um, so it is, it is gonna be interesting to see how it looks, but, um, Matt and him had some pretty good cotton this year. 00:05:26 I know you had some six lock bowls, my understanding, and that's, that's pretty rare. Gabe, you're down there in Mississippi, you're down there 00:05:34 and I mean, you're, you're, you, you, you're in cotton country. You're from cotton country. 00:05:39 Is 50 bucks really that much of a restrictive budget? Well, I mean, so we, we looked at it, um, we're, we're going over it anyway. 00:05:49 Uh, usually starting at Pinhead or before then we're, we're, we're actually trying to slow the cotton down with mepa. 00:05:55 Uh, so we're making those applications. So we, we didn't didn't really factor that in, I don't think, uh, $50, probably a pretty good spend. 00:06:04 I think we could, we could probably do, like Kevin said, we could probably do some different things, less money. 00:06:12 Um, we just need to look at it. So it was kind of fun to have a $50 budget, but at the same time we, we, we are, 00:06:19 we're gonna be happy to see what we get. The point is it's $50 that much restrictive. That's not, we're not, it's not like, 00:06:27 it's not like it's, this is a pretty good number. So, uh, you don't, you don't think that at 50 bucks we're like really 00:06:35 starving anybody out here? No, I don't. I really don't. Okay. All right. Mr. Miles, three and a half bales, 500 pounds. 00:06:45 I'm, I'm learning all this. Um, cotton's, cotton's a a little bit of a squeeze right now on whether it's gonna be profitable. 00:06:56 Um, do you think that at 50 bucks on the foliar you're cutting back somewhere else, you can actually make this a, 00:07:03 a profitable crop this year At, at, it is sad to say this, at three and a half bales. So three and a half bales is a really high goal, right? 00:07:11 So, and, and Normal, average for you is a little less than three. Yeah, but that's where I was gonna go with this. 00:07:19 So in the, with these new varieties we're getting now, you know, 1500 pounds used to be our goal. That would be like a hundred bushel beans in our area. 00:07:28 That's different everywhere else. We we're out there In Arizona where you stay in the summer, you know, five, five bales is, is is a normal crop. 00:07:35 But here in the Delta three bales is a big deal. As these varieties are starting to get better. Three bales is getting more 00:07:43 to be just like almost a grower standard practice. So that's a good thing for us. Sad part is three and a half bales might break us even. 00:07:53 You know, it's not gonna do a whole lot to the $50 an acre spend. We're gonna spend that we're cotton is one of the few things 00:08:01 that you better be on top of all the time to, to Kevin's point, and, and he don't, he don't know this because he don't grow cotton. 00:08:10 We're gonna go over that cotton six, five to six times mandatory no matter what. So you could actually split that up five times 00:08:18 and still piggyback it with whatever plant bug. It's all about the plant bugs and the number of plant bugs we got. 00:08:24 If we get a year where we have three to four plant bug sprays, we've rung the bell on on expenses. 00:08:30 So, so the timing, that's why we went with the four application timing. We could have went six, if we'd have had $80 to spend, 00:08:37 we'd have probably broken up into six different applications because we've got that many times we've gotta go over it. 00:08:43 That really sucks. But insect control, you don't have a whole lot of choice. You gotta do it either way. 00:08:50 Yeah. So you said a long time ago that cotton's a plant that looks to die every day. And so a statement your old man made, 00:08:55 and, uh, the point is you're going over a lot. So it seems to me that 50 bucks in fertility as much as you're going over cotton anyhow, this, 00:09:03 this doesn't seem like it's restrictive by any means. So I guess what, what is the, what is gonna hold you back? What, what, when you look around, you're all these plots, 00:09:13 what do you think is gonna keep you from hitting three and a half bales? Uh, if we, if we don't hit three 00:09:19 and a half bales, it'd probably be potassium. I mean, to be honest with you, you notice we all have potassium, 00:09:25 but where I've made my biggest mistakes is, is, is in the potassium game, you know, is not having enough cotton will show you if you run out 00:09:33 of potassium cotton's the plant that will show you that you've been weak on potassium. I've, I've seen it, you know, in, in last year detrimentally 00:09:42 where I, where I used litter and, and said, okay, I'm putting out two tons of litter that's gonna be 120 units of potassium. 00:09:50 It's a, it's a bad year. We need to cut back on cost. I'm gonna just go with that in a couple of foli years. And in the, in the low CEC soils, it tolled on itself. 00:10:00 Bigly, By the way, on these plots, soil, soil matters. You've got some, you've got sand that is, uh, has nothing to it and you've got, what do you call it, gumbo. 00:10:12 Uh, so did you divulge to your competitors the type of soil this cotton plant was pot was going into? Because I would think that would make 00:10:21 a difference on how you treat it. Yeah, they, they, they knew that, I mean, you don't traditionally, you don't put cotton on the gumbo. 00:10:28 I mean, there is out there, but not very, very small percentage of acres. Stephanie, did Gabe give you any sort 00:10:37 of regional knowledge or did he just think it'd be kind of cool to see a Michigan girl twisting the wind on 00:10:42 failing with cotton? Yeah, they, um, you know, I was teamed with Kelly. So again, you have two northern guys trying to north 00:10:49 Northwest Iowa and a central Michigan, uh, farmer come to come to the Delta and decide they're going 00:10:57 to advise on cotton. Yeah, we didn't get any help, but, um, I think we came up with a pretty good program, so I don't think we're gonna be hurting too bad. 00:11:08 What do you expect to see, Kevin, uh, Matt, what do you expect to, what do you, what do you, what are your thoughts on 00:11:12 this? What's the takeaway? Well, the takeaway for me would be, you know, taking these products in different ways that we're using 'em 00:11:20 and seeing, you know, what that compares to what we normally do. Just like our corn last year, 00:11:25 you know, was the same scenario. What, you know, what I thought should work in my backyard, you know, Stephanie proved me wrong on ROII think, 00:11:35 I don't remember if you were yield. I know you were. No, I was not. I was not top yield. I think Galen beat me by a bush or two. 00:11:43 We're not where Yeah. And now we're all within three or four or five bushels of each other. So none of us got just smoked down. 00:11:49 Uh, but you know, the different programs and how they work work and where you can reduce money, you know, ROI is way more important in yield, you know, 00:11:58 I mean, they follow each other together most of the time, but that's what we're trying to get 00:12:02 through right now is the ROI. So, uh, of course we all spent the same amount of money this year within, 00:12:08 within just pennies of each other. So that's kind of cool too, to see if everybody spend the same amount of money. 00:12:14 There was a product line available. How do you mix that up? Which ones do you use? What timing do you use 'em? 00:12:20 So it's gonna be pretty neat to see. I think we're gonna have a good cotton crop this year based on the weather that the cotton had. 00:12:27 You know, it don't, the, the extreme heat doesn't affect the cotton as bad as it does the other, you know, cotton's an area plant. 00:12:35 So, you know, that helps out. Got it. All right. So stay tuned. If you wanna learn more about what we're doing out here, 00:12:41 we're doing some pretty cool stuff with the economic fertility challenge with our partners agro liquid. 00:12:45 We're doing it on corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton. And the main thing here is taking lessons, creating new ideas, 00:12:52 and bringing lessons to you to help you farm better. We are in a depressed economic environment and, uh, commodity production. 00:12:59 So you need every angle you can get and we can help you do that. That's why we're talking about setting dollar amount limits 00:13:04 and going out here and maximizing the return on the investment to get the biggest yield you can with the minimal amount of investment. 00:13:10 So learn more, go to Extreme Ag Farm. Check out the hundreds of videos, guys like Kevin and Matt put out on their farms. 00:13:16 Also at past episodes of cutting the curve. You can also check out our webinars. You can become a member for just seven $50 a year. 00:13:23 That's right. You get all kinds of cool benefits by being a member, like Yearend Data and also special offers from our business partners 00:13:30 and a direct link to the guys from X Extreme Ag. You know what, we appreciate being here. Till next time, that's Stephanie Linco 00:13:36 and Gabe Saxon with our friends Agro Liquid. If you'll learn more about their line of a products, go to Agro liquid.com. 00:13:42 Got it. Till next time. Thanks for being here. It's cutting the curve. That's a wrap for this episode of Cutting the Curve. 00:13:51 Make sure to check out Extreme Ag Farm for more great content to help you squeeze more profit out 00:13:57.265 --> 00:13:58.545