00:00 Hey, Damien Mason coming at you with Kelly Garrett, one of Extreme ags, founding fathers talking about his objective for 2024. 00:07 We're recording this at Christmas time in 2023. Two years ago, I was in this very office here at Garrett Land and Cattle, and it was very, um, 00:15 Eye-opening, And also it set a theme for the year 2022. He said, Damien, I am going to concentrate on stress mitigation. 00:24 I believe we have never actually seen a stress-free crop. Everything that I do in 2022 is gonna have an overriding 00:30 theme of can we reduce stress on the crop? And it was really neat because it gave us a chance to bop back to that throughout various times of the season. 00:37 Like, what are you seeing about using products and practices to reduce stress? And, and it's really was fascinating, uh, the way we looked, 00:45 you know, took this on. And we even, I encourage you to go back and look at it. Matt Miles talked at one point in one of our webinars. 00:50 Everything we really do as producers is to reduce stress. So can imagine. 00:54 I'm sitting here with Kelly and I said, why don't you tell me what you're going to do in 2024? What's your overriding theme in 2024? 01:01 And you said, I'm going to work on a balanced plant. And that's gonna be an overriding theme of everything we do. Are we keeping our plants balanced? What's that mean? 01:13 We have validated or verified how much nitrogen our soil is releasing, and that mineralized organic nitrogen on top 01:22 of the synthetic nitrogen we have puts our plants out of balance. And the, and that nitrogen becomes extra vegetation. 01:31 I gotta make sure I'm explaining this in the right way. The nitrogen becomes extra vegetation. And this gets into your sustainability a little bit, 01:38 where they talk about we're over-applying nitrogen. We are, but that is an incomplete statement. We are over-applying nitrogen relative to the amount 01:47 of micros or other nutrients that go on. This is oversimplifying the action a little bit, but what the plant does with nitrogen 01:54 is it turns it into a protein. How does it do that? The plant takes micronutrients and produces amino acids. 02:00 The amino acids convert to nitrogen to protein. With the amount of nitrogen we have, we don't have enough amino acids to convert it all. 02:09 So it becomes un assimilated. Yep. And in an extreme case, it even turns to disease such as white mold. 02:15 White mold loves to feed off excess nitrogen when the sun comes out and our soybeans get tall and rank and there's six inches in between the nodes instead 02:23 of an inch and a half or two, that excess vegetation there, that excess, uh, uh, distance in the nodes, 02:31 that's excess nitrogen. The plant is trying to dilute itself to go into reproduction. 02:36 So it's storing this nitrogen in other places to try to come into balance for reproduction. And then when, like, you know, playing on our 2022 theme of, 02:46 uh, stress mitigation, every excess nitrate molecule takes three water molecules to service it. Think about that in a drought type setting 02:55 like we had in 23. Alright, now I wanna go, I, I got about three questions. That's a big one right there. So the 03:00 big one right there is water. We'll just go ahead and take that one first, because that's where we just came to. 03:05 I, first off, I had no idea. Uh, so having more nitrogen than is necessary in the soil. In the soil. And then, you know, the plant takes up 03:15 what we would call luxury consumption, but the, you know, not Really necessary. Not 03:19 really necessary to produce, to produce the crop. It's purely a vegetative response. It's not a yield Response. It's there. And so 03:24 it takes up more than it needs, which we never would've even thought such a thing. And then once it's, uh, assimilated that, 03:29 then also the water demand for the plant is increased. Yes. Because of excess vegetation. Yeah. 03:35 A bigger plant take a bigger bushier plant, which we all think is good and that's great if it translates to yield, 03:40 but if it doesn't translate to yield Uhhuh, then we've just created a lot of vegetative growth. We've 03:45 Created a lot of need for water. Yeah. And then you're gonna say, oh, well this crop didn't, didn't, uh, materialize 03:50 because we didn't get the rains. Well, maybe it also could've materialized better, but because it used a bunch of water unnecessarily 03:58 to produce vegetative growth versus reproductive growth. Is that what I'm hearing? That's Right. This is the, 04:03 the, uh, agronomist that we worked with outta Idaho. We've become good friends. He made a very profound statement to me. 04:09 American agriculture does a great job of producing a very sexy looking vegetative crop. I wanna produce a reproductive crop. 04:17 And all of that excess nitrogen produces vegetation and is provided that vegetation translates to yield. 04:23 That's great. I'm telling you at this point it does not. Is it a agronomic thing or a practices thing 04:28 or a combination of both to ballast the plant? It's a combination of both. Because it's, there's agronomic things we need 04:35 to apply at reproductive and we need to use the practices to do that. Those practices would be, you know, an airplane, 04:42 a helicopter in my situation, you know, temple or Chad. Uh, they could use a hagy sprayer, a highway voice sprayer. Right. Things like that. 04:49 What about then, uh, from an agronomic thing, you said you use nitrogen as an example. Let's just go back to nitrogen. 04:55 Um, is it just a, is it as simple as not over-applying because we've generally over applied nitrogen because it was easy. 05:02 Um, it was generally cheap. It was kind of like insurance. Like, Hey, you know what, we're probably putting on more 05:07 nitrogen than we actually need, but what the hell is cheap? And we'll make sure that we don't have, you know, 05:11 that's not gonna be the reason that we fail This year. Over the last couple years, 05:15 we've actually turned the nitrogen down. When we validated what came, what has come out of the soil, and we even had a hypothesis 05:23 that we could never achieve Balance and balance to us is 95% nitrogen assimilation in the plant. And we can measure that through the SAP testing that we do. 05:32 Okay. But that still doesn't take, you're not getting 95% of your nitrogen applied assimilated, I'm guessing 05:38 because isn't it 35 or 40% of nitrogen? Actually, what we end up with, We are assimilating 95% of the nitrogen in the plant. 05:47 Okay. That's what we're measuring. We measure in the soil what's available. Yep. And at the same time, we're taking a SAP test 05:53 and we're measuring what is being assimilated in the plant. Ballast plant means there's somebody that's still saying, 06:00 I'm, I'm not sure what a ballast plant is. So kind of go, go elementary here on a ballast plant. And, and to, to, to you. 06:08 So the balanced plant to me is when we, you know, you divide the amount of nitrogen in the plant by the total n in the plant. 06:16 And it, uh, what is being used? There's two different nitrogen numbers that we get outta sat test. 06:21 One will tell you what's used. One will tell you what's unused. We wanna be above, our goal is to be above 95% used 06:28 or the term is assimilation. We wanna be above 95% assimilation. That's balance. You've used the word balanced a lot and I, I like it 06:35 because you've introduced me to the ballast. You said a couple of years ago, um, when we were in a recording, you said, 06:43 I don't think there's mined soils. I don't think there's depleted soils. You know, the old thing, well, they came in 06:48 and picked a bunch of K shrimp, but they just mined the hell out of that soil for three years. 06:52 You say, I'm not sure that's as real as imbalanced soils. It's kinda the same thing with the 06:58 Plant. Yes. I, in our area, now you go to other areas that don't, that aren't blessed with the soil we have in Iowa. 07:03 That might statement not, might be as true as it is here, but the statement here, the amount of fertility 07:08 and the amount of potential in the soil is far greater than we realize. Yeah. And when something has been mined 07:14 here, that's not true. It's out of balance. Yeah. We're not using up all the nutrition in the soil. We have just screwed up the balance 07:20 of the soil. So it becomes unavailable. Well, it might be true that some operator came in overpaid for K shred, didn't ne abused it for three years. 07:29 That, that does happen. But you don't think it's a matter of mining. You think it's probably letting it get out of whack. 07:35 What will you do to make sure that the plant doesn't get out of whack? What, what is it that you think, you know, 07:41 from a practice standpoint, I'm still wondering manage moisture as best you can on your irrigated ground. 07:46 What else can you do to keep the plant balanced? So this year we're taking the SAP tests and at V 10 we were down to 85% assimilation. 07:55 You know, at that time, V 10, you're getting, you know, into those mid to later summer months. Yep. And the, 08:01 the microbial system is really weather's wor microbial system of the soil is really cranking up, really releasing a lot of those organic nutrients, 08:08 specifically in specifically nitrogen. And the plant got out of assimilation at V 10. Verne was taking those Evan's reading the data. 08:16 We were at 85% at that time. At V 10 we chose and we ended up spending about $140,000. And, you know, there was, so this was a, 08:24 a bit of a big gamble. 'cause this was the first time we had done it. But we really believed in what we were looking at. 08:29 We, at V 10, we flew the plane, spent the money, and applied a micronutrient nutrient package to try to supply the micronutrients 08:37 that the plant was lacking relative to the amount of nitrogen. And then a week, uh, week 08:42 or two later, were out there taking our next set of SAP samples and we are at 96% assimilation. We did balance the plant. Okay. 08:50 All right. Can a person tell what a plant looks like balance wise? Uh, for appearance? 08:57 No. Not until it's too Late. Not until it's too late. Yeah. The, the plant health 09:00 that we achieved this year was second to none. Yeah. That we have. And our, our crops stayed greener longer. 09:07 And the, because the plant was healthier, just like a healthy person. Is Ballast plant Is ballast plant as an objective then is it, 09:13 is the only payoff yield? Or is there something, obviously we always think yield. If a plant is balanced, it's gonna, 09:20 I'm thinking the benefits are yield. Mm-Hmm. Better utilization of resources. So I can maybe use less. 09:26 Yes. The efficiency is better. Yeah. So I'm, I'm not gonna micro water perspective or I might put the same amount of fertility 09:31 or the same amount of mag micros out, but I'm actually getting my bang for it. You're reaching your potential. Yeah. 09:36 So you're not, we're not wasting, so yield efficiency, uh, or maximization, you know, a lot 09:42 of times n we would say efficiency, I'm starting to use the word maximization. Maximization of the fertility 09:46 input is really what we're talking about. Because efficiency is, gets convoluted. It's maximizing the input. 09:52 Yes, that's true. The yield maximization of the resources. Is there anything else? Is there a benefit down the 09:57 road to a balanced plant? I think that the disease pressure in the field can go away because the disease is gone 10:02 because of the immunity of the plant. So yeah, a healthy plant then doesn't get the disease, then the disease won't carry over to the next year, the next 10:08 Year. Right. It's how, as over time, I believe it will become less prevalent in the soil. That's a smart, that's a smarter 10:14 adjustment there I hadn't thought about. So yes, we might, might decrease the, the decrease the veracity or longevity of a disease pressure problem. 10:23 Yes. Okay. Anything else? Uh, you know, then it, the end goal is it will manifest, manifest itself in yield because we 10:31 will reach the potential. Are we going to, because of balancing the plant, then realize, and I think we've done this a lot already, 10:38 that we are overlying this, we're over-applying that, and then a couple years later you're like, man, we're getting by with 80% of what we used to put on. 10:46 Or we're, you know, you're, you're rate per yield is gonna keep going down. Is that something that you think 10:52 a year from now we'll be talking about? Yes. Because again, you know, the overriding theme, uh, in the public eye is that we're over-applying nitrogen. 11:01 Well, you could just as easily say we're under applying my money, but, but that, now let's take that a step further. 11:07 That doesn't mean I wanna apply more micronutrients and I wanna turn up the anhydrous, right. Because all of that front loading again, 11:13 just leads to vegetation. There's a few products that we're gonna play with and use and research in 24 to 11:21 spike the plant even higher from a nitrogen level. But we're talking about, uh, applying a gallon or two of things from a foliar perspective 11:30 to spike the nitrogen level. So in 23, we did achieve balance. We feel like the crop reached its potential. 11:36 And to put a, to put a metric to it, uh, we were at approximately 1300 parts per million of nitrogen with 96% assimilation. 11:46 And upon ear set, 75% of our plants had two ears. Very excited. Okay. But they aborted. Well, you know what we talked about was it heat 11:56 and, you know, environmental, things like that. And we don't know, but I believe that to allow this plant to flex beyond what we ever thought was possible, we need 12:07 to achieve balance, but we need to achieve balance at a higher level. So there's a few products that we're researching 12:13 that we will apply with the plane, B 10, R one, R five, to try to elevate that nitrogen level in the plant. And again, we're not talking about, you know, like 12:23 for the sustainability folks watching. Yeah. We're not talking about pounds and pounds of nitrogen. We're talking about a a gallon 12:29 or two of, of stuff here or there. So we wanna spike that nitrogen level at the reproductive phases. 12:34 Yeah. And we wanna a apply, we wanna supply the corresponding micronutrients and, and like I said, we were at a 1300 parts per million level. 12:42 I want have 95% of that simulation at say a 2000 parts per million level. And then I wanna see, can I hold both ears 12:48 and what is the corresponding yield that happens at that point? All right. We, Everything you're talking about so far is corn. 12:53 And the person listening is like, okay, that's great. You're Iowa or corn? I'm, uh, a rice producer. I keep up because I'm down here with Matt Miles 13:00 and in Arkansas, whatever balanced, plant balance, balanced plant, this Will work across all crops. 13:06 I, you know, like corn is the one that I work on. This will work in my soybeans, this will work in my winter wheat. 13:11 This will work in, in Matt's cotton and rice. But I can't give you the correspondence. Well, you're using ni you're using nitrogen 13:16 and assimilation for the corn example and be difficult to go through every crop growing in North America. 13:22 But just going over to soybeans, what's the one there that's out of that's not balanced? It's, it's still nitrogen. 13:27 The plants aren't that much difference. The, the, in my situation. Yeah. Nitrogen is out of balanced. Right. 13:31 It's what's interesting is Temple in the Chesapeake Bay region, when we have talked about this, he's supplying a lot more 13:38 micronutrients than most of the rest of us. But it's because it's because of the Chesapeake Bay watershed 13:45 requirements and regulations. He's at Temple was already doing a lot of these things without knowing he was doing it. 13:51 What, uh, the thing is, is then people are gonna say, well, is this as simple as just putting out more micronutrients? 13:56 Well, maybe, but not quite. It needs to be put out at the right time and you need to use, you know, I believe you need 14:01 to use the SAP testing to make good qualified decisions. Does This play into the whole idea we've talked about 14:07 before, extreme ag about spoonfeeding and in other words, the idea of, uh, yes. You know what, what's Matt Miles say? 14:13 He, he used to have did it wrong. He's like, I can't put a buffet out there at, uh, in March and expect it to still have, uh, nutrition 14:20 for those plants come September. We need to, you know, like in our situation, in our situation, we put applied micronutrients this last 14:28 year, V 10, R one, and R five, which is that spoonfeeding approach because Mother nature at that point, again, 14:34 the microbial system, the warm weather, she's really cranking out more and more nitrogen. Yeah. And we need to keep up with that release. 14:40 You can't just put out a whole bunch of V 10 and expect it to last. So monitoring plant balance is going to be a matter 14:48 of tissue sampling, a matter of fast sab sampling, sampling and tissue sampling. Not so much. Not so 14:53 Much. The, the data isn't exact enough for us to know to be predictive. Will, you know, when the combine runs, 14:59 if you accomplished your goal or you know, before then We will know before. We'll know before. No. 15:05 Like this year we had two ears on 75% of the plants. And there's always this, but they Didn't Make it, but they didn't make it. 15:11 And there's always this argument, do we even want the plant to supply two ears because they abort a lot of the time. 15:15 Well, I believe now that they abort because we don't maintain a high enough fertility level. Mm-Hmm. And so we need, you know, like this year I was 15:23 so excited because we achieved a simulation which we didn't even know is possible. Well now I wanna achieve assimilation at a higher 15:30 level then I believe A higher level, A higher level means also later season. Yes. 15:34 Mm-Hmm. I believe slash hope that then I can maintain that second year. It was a major accomplishment for me in these hills 15:41 to just put two ears on all of that. Yeah. And we used to think two years was bad, but like you said, it's because we, we weren't able 15:47 to get the energy to the second ear. So therefore it became like, this is, this is sapping. Yes. Two ears is bad because we've never held it. 15:54 So we felt like it was a waste of energy, waste of time. What we're producing, what if we can find a way to, 15:59 to hold it if we maintain it, and I believe it's possible based on what I've seen, this s**t 16:04 Balanced plants, the overriding theme of garland and cattle for 2024. Next time we check in with you, 16:10 what's the question I'm want ask or what are you gonna show me in the field? And then, uh, what do I need to know about 16:16 I I hope that, uh, I hope that come August, I'm showing you two ears on a lot of plants because we've maintained it. 16:21 Yep. A balanced plant means better plant health means less stress. Yep. And re uh, end result is, means higher yield. 16:28 Got it. What's your objective for 2024? This is the time of year to be thinking about it. Is there a chance that you can, uh, you know, up your game 16:35 by focusing on one overriding theme like you did stress mitigation and, and a couple years ago was overwriting theme kept coming back to it, it changed your product mix, 16:43 it changed how you looked at things. And this is maybe gonna be the same thing. It's gonna change how you think about your croppy system. 16:50 That's right. Uh, we're relearning everything As just say you wanna make small changes, change what you do. 16:55 You'll make big changes, change how you look at things, how you think about things. He's Kelly Garrick. I'm Damien Mason. Thanks for being here. 17:00 So next time, extreme ice, cutting the curve.