Farming Podcast | Is Your Soil Ready for Spring? | XtremeAg

00:00 Setting the stage for a successful planting in the spring by preparing it correctly in the fall. That's what we're covering in this awesome episode of XtremeAg's 00:00:07 Cutting the Curve. Welcome to XtremeAg's 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, Damian Mason. Hey there. Welcome to another fantastic episode of XtremeAg's Cutting the Curve. We're talking about planting. You're saying, "Damian, you're releasing this episode 00:00:28 in the fall. We're talking about planting? I want to hear about harvesting." No. What you do right now in your field, the preparation, the way you're thinking, the 00:00:35 practices you are doing on your farm, what you do right now is going to make a big difference about how the planting succeeds or does not succeed when the planter or 00:00:44 drill or whatever it is you use rolls come spring planting time. Ryan Harbison is my guest. He's an employee of TitleGrow. 00:00:52 TitleGrow, as you know, are doing a sponsor. In fact, they're doing a plot down the road from me. Ryan was here about a month ago, and he said, "Damian, the reason I thought of this 00:01:00 is because I was looking at that field where the alfalfa went behind your house, and you know what? It's got some problems." I said, "You're right. 00:01:05 It does have some problems, and let's go ahead and admit that." I rent my farm ground out. There are some things that were done wrong. 00:01:10 Also, we had a tremendously challenging August. We got 12 inches of rain in the early to mid part of August. Very, very atypical. Then we had another instance in September where it rained about another eight 00:01:20 inches in less than a week. We've been wet, very atypically wet. Also, a challenge because of what was in there before the alfalfa got planted. 00:01:29 So these things that happen pre-planting, whether it's one month in advance or it's three to six months in advance, make a big difference about the success you have 00:01:38 when you do your planting, and it's very important that you are thinking about this now. Ryan Harbison, did I set that up right? 00:01:46 Yeah, 100%. Like I said, we got to talking about that whenever we were walking your field that day, that you had these big areas where nothing was coming up. 00:01:54 We got to looking at it, and well, that's because the residue had bunched up in front of the drill and had pushed through, and so we weren't actually getting 00:02:01 seed-to-soil contact. And that got me thinking about, yeah, we want to talk about planting late winter and spring a lot of the times in the industry, but that all 00:02:10 starts now, with how we do this and what we manage and all the decisions we make over the next three months to get there. 00:02:20 And you farm in Illinois, by the way. I should point out here he's not just some dude with a logo on his shirt. He actually farms in Southern Illinois. 00:02:28 You got a corn, soybean, wheat, and beef operation, do you not? Yeah. Yep, and forages. Run a lot of forages, too. 00:02:35 What you should probably do- Yeah ... out of corn and soy, just go with the forage and the beef business and be retired. You wouldn't even have to work for TitleGrow, Ryan, right now. 00:02:42 Have you seen what the cost of a cow is? Just have a bred cow with a calf by its side, and I think it's like you can buy a Cadillac for that. 00:02:50 Yeah. We've got a truckload going off this week, so we're pretty happy about marketing conditions in our area right now. 00:02:56 But even planting forages, we've got some decisions we've got to make on our acreage right now that we had some grass in that we're wanting to transition to 00:03:06 alfalfa. And so what do we need to do in the next couple of weeks to get that prepped and ready to go? Right now, we've got a lot of cover out there, and yeah, 00:03:15 it's going to get sprayed and killed, and that's going to be fine, but we've got to really make sure to let that stuff die down before we try to go into it, otherwise 00:03:22 we're just going to have a mess trying to run a drill through this stuff. And we can kind of look at that with corn and soybean, too, right? 00:03:28 Yeah. The fields, crops coming off everywhere, looking good. Residue management's going to be a big thing right away. 00:03:35 Yeah. We used to let stalks stay in the field, or we'd mow or plow something, or we'd really work some stuff in. But man, you look at 250 bushel corn, that's a 00:03:46 lot of stover. That's a lot of stalk out there to try to get some ground prep and get going. Even whenever we're throwing fertility on top of that and trying to 00:03:54 incorporate, there's a lot that has to happen in the fall to really get a proper seed bed for spring. 00:04:00 Yeah. So let's go ahead and go through it all. So the point is, we know that you can always blame the season, and I just did. We had a tremendously challenging... Because also you can't farm it. 00:04:10 You can get through weeds. You can get through, but for God's sakes, when it literally rains 12 inches of rain in an eight-day period, it just socks you out for 00:04:19 then another, really, it takes you out for about two and a half weeks. So you can always blame the season, but what do we need to be doing right now? 00:04:25 Regardless of the crop, the things that you see, the biggest problem is anything that prevents seed-to-soil contact, probably. That's one of the biggies, right? 00:04:34 Right. So the first thing is we get that crop off, we've got to start evaluating that residue that's left behind. Even if it's bean stover, how heavy is it? 00:04:43 Is it loose? You've got to start planning ahead. Are you in a floodplain? We've got a field right down the road from me here that we know at some point in 00:04:51 time whenever we get one of these big winter rains or storms, all of a sudden we're going to have stover or corn stalk or something stacked up on one end of the field. 00:04:59 So what's our contingency plan for that? Not only that, we've got to be considering that if that's off the field, those are nutrients that we're not going to recycle anymore. 00:05:08 And so do we need to come in and do a fairly quick incorporation to that, or we're going to run a strip-till unit over it? 00:05:15 That would be the first thing I would be thinking as I'm getting that out of the field is what's our actual soil management strategy going forward into the fall 00:05:23 now- Mm-hmm ... with that spring mindset already in mind. Mm-hmm. Now, in a situation like happened here behind my house, you can't do a 00:05:31 residue meltdown product when your triticale is getting harvested late because of a wet July and wet August. Then the idea that you're going to spray something that's 00:05:40 going to melt it down by spring isn't even good because you're going to go in alfalfa two, three weeks, four weeks later. 00:05:47 But residue management products, there's a boatload amount there. I don't believe TitleGrow makes one, but, your company, but there's a bunch of them 00:05:54 out there. So really, that's something that's a newer concept. I know that's really new to me since I came up with XtremeAg five years ago, but 00:06:03 there's a bunch of them out there. Seems to me that should always be in your mix. Yeah. And a big thing to look at is, yeah, there's residue management products. 00:06:11 You kind of said TitleGrow doesn't have one. We're trying to look at that differently. It's not, yeah, we don't have one that's necessarily labeled as a residue 00:06:17 management product. But we do have stuff out there, and not just us, the marketplace has stuff out there that's going to help with that biological activity. 00:06:27 The best way to melt that residue down is have really good biological activity in that soil that can start working on that as soon as it's hitting the ground, we've 00:06:35 got something there helping break that down. It's also the best way to recycle our nutrients back, because as most people know, going through this, biological activity has to occur for us to actually get 00:06:47 nutrient into another crop that we're going to look at. And so that's another big part of that planning preparation is what are we doing to feed that bacteria over that fallow or lull period that we don't have anything 00:06:59 growing in that field? Mm-hmm. Even if you are, and you've got cover crops, bacteria, again, cover crop emergence late fall, bacterial activity in your soil can help cycle nutrients to that cover 00:07:10 crop. That's a big part of what we need to be looking at in the fall. So that would be my thing. As we kind of plan that, 00:07:18 what we're going to do preparation-wise for the soil in the fall, and kind of what our management plan is there is I think you have to switch to the biological piece- 00:07:27 Yeah ... and start looking at how we feed that and how we get that flourishing throughout the winter. 00:07:32 Okay, what else are we talking about for successful planting come spring in the traditional arrangement, then? Residue management, a lot of it's biological, and 00:07:40 there's a bunch of those products out there. I know that the one thing you haven't said is tillage. And you had mentioned moldboard plow. 00:07:50 You're young to be even mentioning that, but that was the old way of thinking and still too much of the way of thinking. From my observation, we still over-till. 00:07:58 I've said it to my audiences, people that listen to the XtremeAg stuff can squawk, "But you're not a real farmer." Okay, that's true. 00:08:04 But I can tell you that I've always been into soils, and I've been around this business my whole life. I think we're going to look back at all this tillage we do 00:08:11 the way we look at using leeches for healthcare. A couple of years ago, they thought if you were sick, go and just bleed you out, and sometimes it worked. It killed them. They weren't sick anymore. 00:08:21 But anyway, I think we're going to look at it that way. There's still too much fall tillage that goes on, in my opinion, by a lot. Yeah, so here's the thing. And this is, people are going to love our conversation 00:08:34 on this, but I don't disagree with you on that. I think there are appropriate places to be running fall tillage if we need that. That's part of that management strategy. You can also look at a strip till, though. 00:08:45 That's a pretty good way to conserve some of that, or you can look at no-till. I think you have to look at the management strategy. 00:08:51 But I'm going to tell you, diesel fuel prices today, I'm not running recreational tillage on our fall operation. It's just not... Yeah, I get it. 00:09:01 There's something romantic in the agriculture world about seeing those tractors run and that dust cloud fly, and you really feel like you're getting work done, but 00:09:10 That's something we need to evaluate, right? That's where that biology piece comes in, that I don't know, can we change something up as we're going through there to actually get the biology help us some 00:09:18 more when over these kind of mild winters that we normally have now to where we don't have to make that pass right then? 00:09:26 What about getting the biology right? I agree with you, by the way. And also, when the Hefty Brothers had a big session at the Ag PhD event some years 00:09:34 ago, and they talked about the degradation of organic matter through tillage. I mean, through everything from erosion to degradation of organic matter, obviously 00:09:41 to diesel, to compaction. There's a lot of reasons that you should find to not till, but when you do what you've always done, you do what you've always done. 00:09:50 And the good thing is most XtremeAg listeners aren't out of that way. That's why they're tuning in here to find a better way. 00:09:55 What about the fungus to bacteria ratio? Can we do anything about that in the fall that makes a better spring? Does that matter? Because I started learning about that with XtremeAg, how we're 00:10:06 completely out of whack because we have used so much fungicide, we've killed the beneficial fungi in the soil. 00:10:14 Well, and that's the thing, right? And so I'm not a big what you call a bugs in the jug guy, right? We've been given almost a perfect system out here to work with. 00:10:23 And so what can we do to kind of feed these microorganisms that we're after? But like you said, the fungi, if you look at, they're saprophytic. 00:10:32 They're decomposers in the system, right? And so we really need to try to build those up and get it to where we're actually breaking down and battling. What I like to think of is bacteria is going to be more 00:10:44 of that helping us with certain things, as far as keeping things in check, keeping different disease pressures in check. We want more beneficial bacteria than we do non-beneficial to keep that in check. 00:10:57 The fungi are the ones that are creating those micropores in the soil that are coming up and actually breaking down stover and stuff like that, old root mass, 00:11:07 just helping create that environment, right? The other big thing is, think of like a forest system. I know we don't think about that a lot in ag, but whenever you look at these giant 00:11:17 forest systems, there are studies that have been shown that this one strain of fungi can run throughout an entire forest system and help those plants draw 00:11:24 nutrients and water from all over the place, right? If we start thinking about our cropping systems a little bit more like that, if you have a field of corn that's all tapped into each other and can kind of share 00:11:34 resources here and there, that's a pretty cool concept that we don't talk a lot about in the industry. 00:11:39 Yeah. Give me some other thoughts here. We're losing this in the fall. I'm thinking about my spring planting. Anything that I can still go and correct? 00:11:47 Anything that I didn't do that I need to go... Is there anything I can be correcting right now? Yeah, again, we got to get a soil test too, right? That's a key to a fall plan. 00:11:58 What I'll say is the biological aspect that we talk about still has to complement good agronomy, right? 00:12:04 We can't put biology out there and expect it to overcome a soil deficit that we have that we may need to correct. And so looking at that in the fall, 00:12:14 usually markets are more favorable in the fall for fertility. And so looking at what can we get out there this year to start getting that 00:12:20 breakdown and letting that beneficial bacteria and fungi that we're putting out there and helping break down to where that planting timing, now we've got a perfect 00:12:29 seed bed, right? Yeah. We're not having to really try to play catch up the entire season. We've already got a good base underneath of it to start it. 00:12:36 And so I'd start with that soil test. It's a good roadmap to it. It's not the end all be all, but it's a great roadmap to see maybe we need some 00:12:44 lime out there this year, right? Maybe we need potash. Maybe we need to throw a little phosphorus. Just kind of what that balance looks like and what do we need to be doing there. 00:12:51 Got it. All right, so now we're going fall moving into winter. Pretty much now I just go out, hang out, and go to some meetings, go to attend 00:13:01 Commodity Classic. I don't need to do anything, right? And then I come back in the spring and it's all good. Is there anything else I need to be thinking about for between now and planting to 00:13:07 make it so that I have successful planting? It's kind of one of those to me, that winter months again, even where you're at up there, we can stay kind of mild, right? 00:13:16 We'll get that two-week Arctic polar vortex or whatever they call it every year type thing, but- 00:13:21 Wait, wait. Remember, I've been watching the weather since I was a little kid, and remember, to make it more sensationalized, you have to then give every time, every 00:13:31 three-inch snow event gets a name. Winter Storm Larry. Winter Storm Larry is bearing down on northern Indiana because you got to sell the bread and the milk, so by God, the grocery stores got to be packed. 00:13:43 We better get prepared. Like prepared, holy s**t. When I was a kid, we did three inches of snow just like sometimes during the school day. 00:13:50 Yeah. And they'd be like, "It's all fine now. If there's another six inches that comes tonight and the wind picks up, we might have to have a delay tomorrow." Winter Storm Larry. 00:13:59 That's my favorite thing that every little event it now gets a name. Okay. All right. Now, wait, wait. Winter Polar Upside Down Popsicle Gladys is 00:14:10 going to be coming in here and going to really cause us some problems. Temperatures are going to be down in the teens. 00:14:15 Temperatures are in the teens all the time. What are you talking about? Yeah. Right. Yeah, and what we got to realize is, man, those snows actually benefit us 00:14:22 quite a bit, right? It kind of insulates that soil and actually lets us keep rolling. So I hope that we get snow over the winter, honestly. 00:14:29 I mean, we'll figure out how to manage it at some point in time and get kids back to school, right? But- 00:14:33 I'm all about snow, and that's why I also think you shouldn't be tilling. You get some snow on top of something that's holding that crop, that's got... 00:14:39 Or holding that soil. You got a few inches of whether it's residue or cover crop or whatever, and you're grabbing three, four inches of snow, and then it melts in, 00:14:47 then you get another six inches of snow, and it stays there, like you said, insulates it. Winter snow creates August subsoil moisture, right? 00:14:56 Well, exactly. Yeah. We just keep recharging that soil system, right? And so over the winter, though, really whenever I look at it, that's kind of that 00:15:03 waiting period, right? We've done our fall prep. We've got our stuff out there. It's out of our hands a little bit on what happens over those couple months in the 00:15:12 winter. But then coming into spring, again, what's one of the things you see first whenever running out through there, right? 00:15:20 Somebody's going to go run a tractor out across that field with some kind of tillage, whether it's a vertical till machine or something, to test it out, see if 00:15:27 we're ready to go yet. I think the important thing there is let's not get in such a hurry in the spring, right? 00:15:35 The speed at which we can plant a crop now is absolutely phenomenal, right? Yeah. 00:15:40 Talking to some of these guys that, several thousand acre farmers are like, "Yeah, we were planting everything in seven days." It's like, that is crazy how fast and 00:15:48 efficient we can be in the field, right? And so to me, that allows us to wait and get that timing just right if we can, right? Now, I get it. We get towards late April, stuff starts getting challenging. 00:16:00 We've got to make decisions, right? On whether we're going to go or not go. Mm-hmm. 00:16:04 But if we can, let's not hurry that decision in March just because we want to be on Facebook and be the first guy in the field this year, right? 00:16:12 Mm-hmm. Let's take our time and- Wait, wait, Ryan. Just like Winter Storm Larry, not just on social media. On social media with a slow motion drone video of big equipment 00:16:23 going slowly through the field and with or sped up. That's the other thing they like to go show. They're going seven miles an hour planting, and it's got to have a country music 00:16:33 song playing over the top of the drone video also. It's very important to do that. And then #Plant27. Plant27. 00:16:41 And if we can throw some American flags on the back of the tractor while that's going, I don't know a better symbol for- 00:16:47 I mean, Lee Greenwood's coursing through my head right now. So anyway, 00:16:53 that's the real... I'm glad you got to that. Conditions versus calendar. "Calendar says time to go." I'm like, well, 00:17:03 it's not my livelihood, it's yours, but I think you're going to screw the hell out of a lot of... Conditions out here are so bad, you're going to screw up a lot of 00:17:10 stuff by going out here and forcing this. And as you said, that's part of the argument for having the top-notch equipment and being able to get over your acres, that you wait until the conditions are more 00:17:22 optimal, and then you just go. Well, I get it, right? There's seed companies out there that'll give free replants now, and I think that's one of the worst things that ever happened because guys 00:17:33 didn't have to worry about that initial investment of getting that in because they knew on the backside somebody was going to cover the mistake, right? 00:17:40 I've always been a guy, though, I'd rather do it right the first time, not have to do it a second time. Again, because diesel fuel's over, what is it, $5.50 a gallon? 00:17:48 Yeah, $6.30, $6.60. And you want to go out there and drive- Yeah. And I don't want to do that twice, right? 00:17:55 Because, yeah, I'm getting free replants, but nobody's covering that diesel fuel bill. 00:17:59 Mm-hmm. Nobody's covering the equipment cost or the maintenance on those planters from having to run twice. 00:18:04 Mm-hmm. And as we know, then you have to start making decisions. Do I replant the whole field? Do I spot in? 00:18:10 And everybody you talk to, whenever you start spotting crop in, well, you're automatically taking that yield down in that field. 00:18:16 I mean, I'm sure there's people that would argue that, but from what I've seen in my career, we started getting a lot of variability in the fields, and now we're not 00:18:24 going to be near as uniform across there. But yeah, everything has a cycle. And like you said, yeah, I get it. We have a manmade calendar cycle that we want to 00:18:34 go by, but nature ultimately kind of dictates when the best timing is to go out there, and I think we got to really watch that. 00:18:41 Got it. We're going to recap the entire thing, the entire process from a successful fall, successful planning the spring, and what it looks like for the preparation in 00:18:50 the fall. Before we get to the recap from Ryan, I want to go through with and also my last big point, and it's not about tropical storm or winter storm Larry. 00:18:59 That's the other one, by the way, they got to be both tropical and winter. You notice that? Again, if it's a two-inch rain event, it happened and a little bit 00:19:06 of wind, it's not just a little thunderstorm that blew through, it's summer solstice cyclone, whatever the hell it is. 00:19:17 In Arizona, we started having these things called haboobs, and I'm like, "Is this a real word?" Yes. We got that now, too. Haboobs. All right. Horatio's haboobs. 00:19:28 Yeah. Tropical storm, Cindy, winter storm Larry. If you're a farmer, imagine knowing your soil as well as you know your fields. With Earth Optics, you get the most precise soil insights in the industry. 00:19:39 Clear, accurate data on fertility, biology, and compaction. No more guessing. You can just get the information you need to make smarter decisions, optimize your 00:19:46 input costs, and boost yields. Earth Optics puts the full picture of your soil right in your hands, so you can farm confidently and profitably, unlock healthier 00:19:53 soils, stronger harvests, and a better bottom line. Go to earthoptics.com. That's earth like the planet you live on, optics like your eyeballs.com. 00:20:00 Check it out. Okay, so your recap is, be thinking about planting when you're harvesting. Residue management, pull your soil samples, do residue breakdown products, 00:20:15 avoid tillage. The whole issue about the biology and, we learn more and more about that all the time. What can you do to get your biology right so that soil's working during the 00:20:27 winter to prepare for better soil? I remember being, Lubbers was on this show several years ago. He talked a lot about everything we can to enhance things like earthworm activity 00:20:36 and avoiding compaction. Those are all real issues. What else? Yeah, no, 100%. And then coming back to the tillage, make sure that we're not doing 00:20:47 recreational tillage. I won't say all tillage, but recreational tillage because there are times in the field that you have to run a piece of equipment over. 00:20:54 I understand that. If you get tiling, you're going to have to come back and work that in, right? But that recreational fun pass tillage, it's probably something we 00:21:02 can give up. But yeah, just getting that biology, getting all your fall prep done to where then we can let Mother Nature take over during the winter and do what she 00:21:10 needs to do, so whenever we decide that I come back into those proper conditions in the spring, we've done everything we can do to that point to actually give that 00:21:19 seed the best chance of that strong germination and good quality regrowth. Seed to soil contact, having the right biology, making sure that your fertilizer 00:21:28 numbers are right, and then also, waiting until the conditions are right versus what the... Don't be tempted just because you saw the slow-motion drone shot video. 00:21:39 And, by the way, this has been a thing since I was a kid. The neighbors 00:21:46 drive by somebody's farm with a planter. By golly, they got to go get their planter out, right? Well, that's what... Yeah, funny thing on that. 00:21:52 When I worked retail, we had an older farmer in there that just liked messing with everybody. He would get his planter out and drive it around the block where all the 00:22:00 other neighbors could see it, and he would literally go back and park it back in the shed. You give it six hours, everybody else's shed doors were open, tractors 00:22:08 were moving around, everybody was hooking up. It was like clockwork, and he just enjoyed doing it every year. He'd come in and laugh at it. 00:22:16 Oh, boy. That's great. All right. His name's Ryan Harbison. We're talking about successful planting. 00:22:21 It starts in the fall, and that's why he's on here. His company's called TitleGrow. If you want to learn more about their company and the products they offer, 00:22:26 remember, Ryan was on my farm here last month. His inability to criticize things as you basically heard him say. But you know what? That's fine. I like the expertise coming in here and telling me 00:22:35 what I'm doing wrong. Anyway, the TitleGrow plot is down the road from me here at one of my fields, so stay tuned for those answers. 00:22:42 We did one last year, and we did one again this year. If you want to learn more about their line of products like AlignIN, AlignIN allows you to reduce your nitrogen spend on synthetic fertility and not lose yield. 00:22:53 AlignIN is one of their products that you should probably be considering amongst these challenges you have right now, like with your fertility prices. 00:23:01 Go to titlegrowag.com to learn more. Ryan, thanks for being on here. Yeah, appreciate it, Damian. 00:23:08 You really weren't that critical. There are people that come in here and say worse things. You're not too that bad. Well, right. But it's one of those that I didn't have to be critical. 00:23:17 You're doing a lot of things right. There's your protections in the field. All right, till next time, thanks for being here. 00:23:23 This is eXtremeAg's Cutting the Curve. Go check out all of our cool stuff at extremeag.farm. Also, go to our YouTube channel, check out our show, The Granary. 00:23:29 We've been doing it now for two years. The show, The Granary, we shoot it right here at my man cave. My granary turned into tavern and gathering place. 00:23:36 We cover all kinds of cool stuff. Go check out The Granary, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out the hundreds of videos and podcasts that are our 00:23:44 free library for you to get smarter and farm better. Till next time. That's a wrap for this episode of Cutting the Curve. 00:23:51 Make sure to check out extremeag.farm for more great content to help you squeeze 00:23:56.166 --> 00:23:58.746