Farming Podcast | How a Faster Sprayer Fill System Adds Acres & ROI with Temple Rhodes

00:00:00 Make your spraying safer, simpler and faster. That's what we're talking about. Especially the faster, 00:00:05 because I know that's what excites you farmers. That's what we're covering. This episode of Extreme Ag, cutting the Curve. 00:00:10 It's extreme ag cutting the curve podcast, cutting your learning curve, and improving your farming operation every week. 00:00:17 This episode of The Cutting the Curve podcast is powered by Nature's bio kay technology delivering enhanced nutrient 00:00:24 cycling, greater plant health, and elevated stress mitigation leading to increased crop yields. 00:00:29 Visit nature's dot com. And now let's get ready to learn with your host, Damien Mason. 00:00:35 Hey there. Welcome to another fantastic episode of Extreme Ice Cutting the Curve. We're talking about your spraying 00:00:40 and we're not talking about the sprayer itself, we're talking about everything that you do before it gets to the sprayer. 00:00:45 And can we quicken that Temple? Rhodes is joining me with Extreme Ag and we're joined by Wayne Stewart with Dura Products. 00:00:52 All of the guys, all the extreme ag guys now have a Dura products, fast batch, fast batch, multi jet, or fast batch Venturi, if you're watching versus listing. 00:01:01 I'm holding up a image of what we're talking about. Essentially, it's how you fill your sprayer and you know what sprayer might cost 500, 600, 700, 00:01:09 $800 million. A lot of money tied up. How much does that machine cost you? We're gonna dig into the economics. 00:01:15 Wayne Stewart actually gave me a really cool graphic on that, that we're gonna be putting up later in this episode. So you can go and check it out 00:01:21 where it actually punches out the return on investment of a piece of equipment that makes your spraying faster. We're not talking about the spray 00:01:27 or going faster, we're talking about the fill temple. You got one of these machines, you are the first one to use it. 00:01:33 You have the fast batch multijet. What is it? Why do I knd it? How does it make my spraying faster, safer, and simpler? 00:01:41 It's, um, you know, well first of all, I thought that, you know, when, when I first looked at this, I was like, man, it's going to take up a lot of room on my trailer. 00:01:48 Um, and that, that was one of my concerns. But like my, my spray trailers, now they have two big inductors on them 00:01:56 and it, you know, let's just go with what we used to do. We used to have 3, 4, 5, 6 totes sometimes 00:02:03 that are on the trailers that were mixing foliar nutrition or maybe chemistry with 'em or both. 00:02:10 And we had pumps and motors hanging on the side of every one of those totes. So you can imagine how much room that takes up, right? 00:02:18 So now we got this system where it's all, it's all in one basic. I mean, it's made so you can take it on 00:02:25 and off the trailer with like a forklift. It's, I mean, it's super convenient. It's not very wide. It's kind of a, it's a little bit long, 00:02:33 but it's got a, um, it's got it already has an inductor already built onto it and then it has the ability to, 00:02:41 all the pumps are already built right into it. So the only thing that you have to come off of this with is just, um, um, uh, input hose that goes, that goes 00:02:49 to each one of your totes. So you don't have stuff all over the trailer. You don't have an input hose, you don't have an output hose, 00:02:55 you don't have any of that stuff. It direct injects each one of the chemicals or foliar nutrition or whatever you may be pumping. 00:03:04 It's directing it directly into the line as it's going out onto the sprayer. You know, our mixing ability is better. 00:03:11 We're not rinsing out our inductors in between each one of the, you know, whatever the chemistry is or the micronutrients 00:03:19 or what it might, whatever it might be. We're not doing any of that anymore. It's directly injected into line. 00:03:25 And the nicest part about it is, is once it all set up, we just punch in the amount of, of the gallons or the quarts, whatever it may be per acre 00:03:36 or per tank load that you wanna put in. You turn it on and it's pumping all that, all that, uh, chemistry right directly in the line. 00:03:44 It goes in the trailer. You're not getting splashed with chemicals, you're not handling it, you're not touching it. 00:03:50 Like all of that stuff goes away. Alright, Wayne, you are the president of this company called Dura Products. 00:03:55 If you're on an airplane, uh, go into their headquarters in, uh, in, in Indiana, small town Indiana. 00:04:01 And someone says, what's this, what is this? What do you say this is? It's a sprayer filler. Is that what it is? 00:04:06 Yeah, it's just all in one sprayer, filling system, plug and play. All you need to do is plug in the water, 00:04:12 plug in the chemicals, and then take the exit from it to your sprayer. It's all ready to go. It's, uh, take this the right way. 00:04:20 It's, we, it makes things faster, it makes things simpler. It makes things safer. Why did nobody 00:04:25 else come up with this? Well, there's some unique things that we do auraura that we're the only ones that do it. 00:04:32 So we've got these auto batch meters that allow you to kind set the chemical you wanna load and press start and it opens up a valve, pumps the pump 00:04:39 and then turns the pump and shuts the valve when you done with. We're the only ones that have that. 00:04:43 So having that, we were able to take the feedback from the farmers and kind of integrate it into a system 00:04:49 to make it much easier, much easier. And, uh, give it all one system on, on a skid like you, like Temple had mentioned, 00:04:56 pop it on the sprayer and, and away you go, Pop it on your spray trailer. This, so this, you have, this is unit right here. 00:05:02 Temple is on a self-contained unit. You take your forklift and then set it up on, uh, your tender trailer. 00:05:08 Am I right? Yep. Mine sits in the center of my tender trailer. That's correct. So you got tanks in the front, tanks in the back, 00:05:15 and then various chemicals, inputs, et cetera, and next to this thing. Yep. So, so the way that mine is set up, 00:05:22 I actually didn't set mine up with a motor on it. It's set up so you can actually run right outta the motor and push right out of it 00:05:29 and it will push it right onto your sprayer. I didn't set mine up like that. I set mine up so my motor sits in the back 00:05:35 and I actually suck it through the whole system and it works fantastic. We didn't know that it was gonna work this well, 00:05:40 but it it, it works great. All you gotta do is basically put your input line in there, you know, from of your tanks 00:05:47 and then it goes right out there very straight onto your sprayer. You don't ever, you get no chemicals on yourself. 00:05:53 You, I mean, how many times have we sat around an inductor like my whole life, you know, when we're dumping in chemistry 00:06:00 or we're pumping in chemistry and you've got a hose in the top of the tank of your inductor and you're, 00:06:06 you got your splashing chemical everywhere, all of that goes away and you don't have to worry about rinsing out the, the inductors. 00:06:13 Like none of that, all that stuff goes away 'cause it's directly pumped right straight into the line. And the mixing ability is much better 00:06:21 because, you know, you're, you're pumping it through the line with enough water. You know, they always say, you know, 00:06:26 dilution is the solution, right? So imagine like when you're pumping, let's say you have, oh, I don't know you something like bicep, right? 00:06:34 You know, you're putting bicep in your inductor and you might be putting 30 gallons in there and you pull the plug on the inductor 00:06:41 and you're sucking all of it in at once. Well that's a tremendous amount of chemistry that's going in the line 00:06:48 that you're not really diluting very well because it's taking majority of it right there where this system, it's putting it in the 00:06:56 line as it goes through. So the, the dilution of it going into the sprayer is much, much better. Your lead off on the Wayne fast, simple, safe, 00:07:10 and you call the product fast batch so fast is what you're principally offering as your value proposition to a farmer. 00:07:18 And I'd say why does that matter? But we kind of got into it, a sprayer costs a lot of money and the faster we can turn it meaning 00:07:27 that it's not sitting getting filled, the more usable utility we're getting from the sprayer. I think that I've just articulated that, 00:07:37 but give it to me from your perspective, uh, from uh, the guy that's, uh, the expert with this company product. Yeah, so I think if to understand that the best, 00:07:47 you gotta understand what most people are doing, which is exactly what Temple had mentioned. So they're taking big cones, usually two or three of them. 00:07:53 They're filling those cones up with all the chemical you want for that batch, and then you're sucking it out 00:07:57 and you're doing one at a time. And that process typically takes 20 to 25 minutes with our system because it directly injects. 00:08:04 You can inject 'em all at the same time. It takes about five minutes, right? And so when you look at that ROI calculator, what 00:08:10 that translates to into a day is enough time saving that you get one more spray load a day. Typically people get about a hundred 00:08:17 acres out of a spray load. So, you know, in, in simple terms, you convert from the old way to doing it to this system, 00:08:23 you're getting, you're gonna be spraying a hundred more acres per day. Okay? So that's what matters in terms of speed. 00:08:31 Now you and I said something that I thought was interesting, you said it allows you to also run your spray rig slower, 00:08:37 which then would improve efficacy or coverage. Temple scoffed laughed temple. Why'd you scoff and laugh at that? 00:08:45 Because even though it's a neat idea, what do we all know about you farmers? Man, farmers ain't gonna go slower. 00:08:51 I mean that it's never gonna happen. I mean, that's a great idea that you got, but it's not gonna happen. 00:08:56 We're gonna run the speed that we're gonna run and which that speed is always gonna be maximum regardless it's going, we're 00:09:02 gonna be going as hard as we can. Faster for me is, is, you know, the sprayer sits on the, you know, on the headland filling up 00:09:11 and it's like you said it's 20 to 25 minutes sometimes, you know, sometimes it's less than that, but for the most part it's not. 00:09:19 If I can save 15 minutes, uh, per fill and we're filling up, you know, seven to 10 times a day, you know how many acres that is? 00:09:26 Like that's a lot of acres not even including most of these sprayers out there. If you were gonna rent 00:09:32 or lease a sprayer, it's anywhere from 175 to $225 a machine hour. So you're sitting there paying for a machine to sit there 00:09:44 and run and not be productive whatsoever. How many hours a day? Yeah, By the way, I like that. And 00:09:50 the thing is, we know that in January the sprayer's sitting in the shop and it's not making you any money, we know that, 00:09:57 but it's like everything during its useful timeframe, which means when the weather is right and it's not too hot and it's not too windy 00:10:07 and the crop is the right timing, whether it's the right vegetative or re reproductive stage or whatever it is, when it's time to go, 00:10:16 those hours are obviously critically important. And then those numbers you just said, if you were renting that machine, how much will be paying per hour? 00:10:25 Just minimum of $200 an hour? Yeah, So if I'm paying 200 bucks an hour, it's a hell of a lot of money to have sitting there. 00:10:32 Wayne, you, your company came up with this and we're gonna have, our producer will put this up. If you're listening to this when you're driving down the 00:10:40 road or in your piece of equipment right now, I encourage you to watch this video. You can watch it@extremeag.farm where we have all 00:10:46 of our cutting the curve podcasts or also on the cutting the curve of the podcast on YouTube. Um, go and check out this video if you're listening 00:10:53 because the folks at Dura products came up with this chart. I'm holding it up right now, but Wayne, walk me 00:11:00 through it in, in layman's terms here. The big thing I'm seeing is it allows me to get more acres done per day, 00:11:06 but your company did a pretty cool thing you put up here, uh, previous sprayer loading system 00:11:12 that I'm spending 20 minutes and yours five minutes. That's a biggie right there. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, it's easy to talk about 00:11:19 that, but we wanted to kind of put dollars and cents to it to see, you know, does this make sense? Is it, is it worthwhile for someone to kind 00:11:25 of invest the money in a system like this? So when we translated that as we, and we looked at that time savings, uh, on average, again, 00:11:32 you're gonna save about one square, you're gonna end up doing one square load per day. And if you're doing more like Temple 00:11:37 mentioned, you can even do more than that. So if you're looking at that, we've had several farmers, uh, tell us they've used our system 00:11:43 to go from a two man operation to a one man operation. So instead of paying someone sit around on the tender trailer while they're out spraying, 00:11:49 they're just doing both because it's so fast. They hop off the square, fill it up and go. Um, so when you look at that, 00:11:55 By the way, on that, on that line item, which I like and I don't know how temple's doing it, Temple's labor is his kids. 00:12:01 So he's kinda like, he doesn't value them. He doesn't even think that their hours matter, but you know, they do. 00:12:08 And by the way, Alexander and, and Little Temple, just in case you're listening to this, I love you, I really do. 00:12:14 I don't, I don't view you as free help the way your father does. Yeah. So if, uh, well 00:12:20 You gotta remember if it's if no, go ahead. If It's what, what do I gotta Remember? No, you, uh, the other thing that you're, 00:12:28 that you're not thinking about, like we had two sprayer trailers, so you can leave one sprayer in the field, 00:12:34 one guy can fill up to get all the work done, get it done really, really fast, and the other guy can get in a tractor trailer 00:12:40 and run back up the road and get another load of water or another load of fertility. Yeah. Whatever he's gotta do. 00:12:46 Like, you know what, people aren't sitting around. Yep. Right? Exactly. Exactly. And, And then you go through a thing, Wayne, 00:12:54 on your chart here, go ahead, continue to explain what your thoughts are on, on the, the, the fast part and then bring it back to the economics. 00:13:01 Sure. Yeah. So if you're much faster than that allows you to do that. So, you know, we calculate it out on the labor savings 00:13:07 of a 24 an hour rate. Um, you can save about 3,500 bucks a season. So there you go. You can add that 00:13:13 to the allowance there temple to the, your kids, but um, that's About what he pays them a year, 3,500. 00:13:19 He's he's right. He's, he pays his kids for $300 a month. Yeah. Um, okay. 00:13:25 I charge him rent to live in the house too. Right, Right, right. They owe him. Um, you went 00:13:30 through a thing on your calculation, Wayne, and obviously we did the hours, and again, a lot of farmers are guilty, all joking aside 00:13:37 of not counting what hours cost. Well, hours cost something and obviously hours on machinery costs. 00:13:43 I like that you make a case here, you make a case here that, and this is smart, not just thinking about, okay, 00:13:50 if you rented that machine, okay, someone says, well, you know what? I got the machine no matter what. 00:13:54 You make the case on your chart here, Wayne, that if I burn less hours on my machine, obviously then my machine either lasts longer 00:14:01 or has greater residual value when I'm ti ready to trade it in. I'm sure that's something a lot of folks don't think about. 00:14:07 Obviously it's just like some chemistries and whatnot have a lot of technologies have allowed us to use less tractor hours to get the same cropping done. 00:14:15 That's the case you're making. That's exactly right. So for this example farm, which is a, a farmer in Indiana here with 2,400 acres 00:14:22 of corn in 2000 of soybeans, you know, he would save 33 hours over the course of five years on his machine 00:14:28 by using our system versus his old system doing it. And that translates to 26, $600 in value at trade in saving by having those less machine hours on the machine. Yep. 00:14:40 And then you did a thing and you said that your total savings in a season using these numbers, you come up with $46,000. 00:14:48 And how, how long does it take you for an ROI, so essentially if, if we're in a tough farm economy right now, 00:14:55 and I can save using your numbers, how long does it take for me to justify buying a your product 00:15:01 About half a season? So the product's gonna be generally around 20,000 roughly, um, for a farmer depending on options 00:15:08 and they're saving $46,000 Temple. This chart addresses the economics. I I know that your BS meter goes up when you're a farmer 00:15:16 and say, okay, you're promised me a lot of stuff there. But bringing it back to the basics that you just said, don't, you don't have guys sitting around, 00:15:23 you are filling faster, the machine's moving, which is what it needs to do when it's time go time with your sprayers go time. 00:15:28 Is there anything else on the fast feature that you've seen on the farm? Well, Well, I mean that you pretty much covered 'em for, for us, 00:15:37 I mean it's, it's a lot of time, a lot of savings for us and if I can spray another a hundred acres in a day, 00:15:42 that's huge for us. Especially when you get into like, let's just talk about late season, um, stuff that we do on like soybeans for instance. 00:15:52 You know, sometimes we'll be making a pass and then, you know, five or six days from now we're gonna need to make one more pass 00:15:59 through, through those, the same bean field. And if we do that, like we can, if, if you're not careful, sometimes you can't, you, you can't hit those, 00:16:10 those periods of influence, those stages where you can actually influence something. So you get your products in 00:16:17 and let's say that you have a bunch of potassium acetate, you know, that you order from nature's or wherever 00:16:22 and you got, you have it here and then you actually don't get the value of hitting that stage at the right crop. 00:16:28 You know, the, the crop at the right stage. How much money does that cost us? Do we even, I mean, how do you even calculate that? 00:16:35 But the, the fact of the matter is, is at least a hundred more acres a day. I can make sure that I hit that window, you know? 00:16:41 And I got one more. No, go ahead. No, speaking of fast, this is the other one, Wayne, since you know, you're just getting accustomed to 00:16:47 how things work around extreme ag here. One of the kids that Temple doesn't pay, um, was going really fast and I think, 00:16:54 didn't he take a spray boom and wrap it around a telephone pole last season? Is that, isn't that, am I thinking about this correctly? 00:16:59 Oh yeah, we've, we, we we've done we've done all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've done all that. The good news is, is we really know how 00:17:07 to weld here at at at CMF at the shop. Like we're, we're good at it. I mean we, we tear up enough stuff, 00:17:13 but you know, I got another point, you know, we keep bringing up the farmers. The farmers, the farmers. Well what about the people 00:17:18 that are out there like the, you know, the commercial, um, applicators, you know, there's a ton 00:17:24 of commercial applicators out there that look how much time and savings that this can save them in a day. 00:17:29 You know, a lot of these guys, they're charging anywhere, at least in my area. Um, to have something commercially applicated 00:17:35 for you is somewhere between 12 and $15 an acre. That's what it cost us. Yep. So if he can put in another a hundred acres a day, 00:17:44 that's another $1,500 a day that that guy can make. Like this would be a no for him. I mean, you're talking about what, 13 days, 00:17:53 14 days at the max and he's paid this system off. This is an absolute home run for those guys. Do you have commercial applicators as uh, part 00:18:03 of your customer base at Dura products? You probably do, right Wayne? We do. We sure do. Yeah. Yep. 00:18:07 So there's lots of commercial applicators that do it and like you said, they get paid per the acre, not per the hour. 00:18:11 Right. So the faster they can do it, the more money they can make. So, alright, we, 00:18:16 We've addressed the, the fast. Do me a favor and address the other two value propositions that you present to the farmer 00:18:23 or to the commercial applicator. Simple and safe, simple. Um, temple already talked about the fact 00:18:29 that he's not getting stuff splattered all over him and he plugs it right in. Is there anything that we missed on simple? 00:18:35 Yeah, I think simple is just that, uh, you know, it's as simple as putting punching in what you wanna load of each chemical. 00:18:42 So, you know, in your recipe on the fill tank, I'm gonna have so many gallons of one chemical, so many gallons of the other based on 00:18:47 how many ounces per acre you wanna do. You just punch that in and press start. There's no like touchscreen or recipe management. 00:18:54 Um, there's no real complicated technology to work. It's, it works very similarly to the standard pumps and meters that the DUR products makes. 00:19:03 Um, you just really gotta know the order of operations and you're, and you're good to go. Timble could probably speak that a lot more 00:19:07 than I could as he's using. Yeah, I mean, once, once your power's on and you have your, you know, 00:19:13 you can start all the pumps at once. If you, if you'd like to say, if you've got, you know, on my trailer right now, I've got it hooked 00:19:18 to four different totes right now at the moment, and I can put all, I can press 'em all start at the same 00:19:24 time and they can all run. Or if I have an order where, you know, let's say glyphosate needs to go in first 00:19:30 and then I need to put in, you know, two, four D or whatever, and I have an order, you can actually, you know, hit start, wait for it to finish, hit start again. 00:19:40 Like you can do that as well. Or you can hit 'em all at the same time. I mean, I gotta be honest with you, 00:19:45 I hit start all at the same time because there's so much dilution that's going through a three inch line 00:19:50 that I really don't necessarily worry about it. It's been really, really fast, really, really safe for me. Um, I think that it's a, it's a home run. 00:20:00 It's all built with an inductor already right on it. So your, your small, um, stuff that might be in, you know, uh, jugs, two and a half gallon jugs 00:20:08 or one gallon jugs, they got a really neat little, uh, knife system that's inside there then. And it's hooked to a, um, to your rinse out. 00:20:17 So you can rinse the, the jugs right out and get everything outta your jugs and it and run right through your inductor that's on there. 00:20:24 It's just they don't need a in, you know, 80, 90 on inductors. They don't need to have a inductor that big 00:20:34 because they're not putting in that much chemistry. Your larger quantity, um, chemistry is all going through this machine. 00:20:41 Like, it, it saved me on a lot of things. It saved me room on my trailer. I don't have a bunch of wires run all over the place, 00:20:48 you know, 'cause keep in mind, like I got four totes on there right now. I would have four motors hanging off of every tote. 00:20:55 Each one of them would have to go, you know, a hot wire and a ground wire, have to go up to a central location. We don't have any of that anymore. 00:21:02 It's all, it's all on one piece. Like it has battery, you know, you have a battery right there on this unit 00:21:08 and it even has like a little solar panel and it keeps your battery, um, you know, charged up. It's a trickle charger on there. 00:21:15 Like they have figured out everything on this thing to make it as simple for the farmer or the commercial applicator as possible for little 00:21:24 to no downtime whatsoever. It's, it's a pretty seamless system. I think we can about leave it right there, can't we Wayne? 00:21:32 Uh, he went through everything and he's the guy that's been using it. All of our guys are using the Fast Batch, multi Jet 00:21:37 or Fast Batch Venturi this year. So stay tuned. We'll probably show you some stuff from some of the field days. 00:21:42 Speaking of field days, we've got a bunch of them. May 22nd is our first one at Chad Henderson. June 12th. We're gonna be in Arkansas at McGee, uh, 00:21:50 McGee, Arkansas at Miles Farms. June 26th. We're gonna be over at Garrett's in Iowa and we get into August, August 5th at, uh, Johnny Verell's, 00:21:58 August 7th at, uh, Matthews Farms, North Carolina. Uh, August 15th or 16th, we're not exactly sure yet. We're gonna be up in Canada north of the border, assuming 00:22:07 that somehow they don't charge us all 25% to cross the border. And then they're also going to be our last field day 00:22:13 of the year is, uh, Chestnut Manor Farms. That's where Temple Roads resides and exploits his children. And that's gonna be on August 21st. 00:22:22 Anyway, uh, if you enjoyed this, uh, you know what, do share it with somebody. And also you should really 00:22:28 consider becoming an extreme Ag member. You don't have to be in a member to come to our field days. You don't have to be a member to watch all of our stuff. 00:22:32 But for seven $50 a year, you become a member. You get direct access to guys like Temple. You can call 'em up directly 00:22:37 and get answers to your questions. You also get Euro end data and also special offers from our business partners. 00:22:43 Anyway, Wayne, thanks for being here, man. Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. Little, Little old Attica, Indiana. 00:22:52 No, wait, wait, what's the town? It's, uh, Arcadia, Indiana. Arcadia, Indiana, small town Indiana. 00:22:58 I'm so glad we've got a business partner with Hoosier Roots. You know what? Great things come outta the Hoosier State. 00:23:03 Ah, speaking of which, the Grainery show that is produced by Extreme Ag Shot at my farm just about an hour 00:23:09 and 20 minutes away from Arcadia, Indiana and Huntington, Indiana. Go check that out. We've been shooting the Grain room, 00:23:14 my friend Temple's been there. It's real Farmers real Talk. Pull up a chair and join the conversation. 00:23:19 It's a lot of fun. You can find those episodes at Extreme Mag Farm or at our YouTube channel. 00:23:24 Go and subscribe to that Wayne. Thanks for being here. The company's called Dura Products. If I wanna learn more about the Fast Batch system 00:23:31 to improve my spraying and make it faster, simpler and safer, where do I go? Go to dura products.com, everything you use right there, 00:23:40 Dura products.com. And do check out that graph that we put up there. It really does map out the thing. 00:23:46 Till next time, he's Wayne Stewart with There are products joined by Temple Roads with Extreme Ag and Chestnut Marine Farms. 00:23:51 I'm Damien Mason, and this is Extreme ags Cutting the Curve. That's a wrap for this episode 00:23:56 of Extreme ags Cutting the Curve Podcast. Make sure to check out extreme ag.com for more great content. 00:24:02 Cutting. The curve is powered by Nature's Bio. Kay. Check out natures.com to learn more about how Bio Kay can improve your farm's. 625 00:24:10.165 --> 00:24:10.605