Farming Podcast | Relay Cropping: Farming Weird With Jason Mauck

00:00:00 Farming weird. Why you should consider relay cropping, at least as an experiment on your farming operation. 00:00:05 That's what we're talking about in this episode of extreme Ag Cutting the curve. It's extreme ag cutting the curve podcast, 00:00:12 cutting your learning curve, and improving your farming operation every week. This episode of The Cutting the Curve podcast is powered 00:00:19 by Nature's bio kay technology delivering enhanced nutrient cycling, greater plant health, 00:00:24 and elevated stress mitigation leading to increased crop yields. Visit nature's dot com. 00:00:30 And now let's get ready to learn with your host, Damien Mason. Hey there. Welcome to another very special edition 00:00:37 of Extreme as Cutting the curve. You know, I've been doing this for four years and I look forward to some recordings more than others. 00:00:41 Not gonna lie, I've been looking forward to this one because I got Jason Mock on here. Jason lives about 50 miles south of my farm. 00:00:47 He's in Gaston, Indiana, Delaware County, the, the pride of West LL High School. 00:00:52 He's doing a thing farming weird. He's been doing this for a while. He's got a huge following on social media 00:00:57 where he puts out stuff and then he has some detractors, but he also has a lot of devotees. 00:01:01 He's gonna be putting on a field day, in fact, in June, uh, to show off some of this relay cropping, 00:01:06 he was in the Grainery, which is the show that I do here with Extreme Ag, with Kelly Garrett this winter recording. 00:01:11 And we talked a little bit about that and it dawned on me that if you didn't tune into that episode of Grain Re, even if you did, 00:01:17 why don't we cover it here on cutting the curve and go a little more in depth. Um, farming weird is kind of his tagline. 00:01:23 He's got his shirt on and hold bit relay cropping. What is it? Why should I try it? So in an essence, 00:01:32 relay cropping is grown two crops together for a time. Polyculture is basically growing 'em their whole life cycles together. 00:01:39 But relay, we plant the wheat in late September, harvested in June. We're planting the beans in April, 00:01:46 and they grow together for about 80 to 90 days. And the big value in is we just are able to harvest light and water, more water, more light on that acre, um, and, 00:01:58 and, and kind of control the landscape from a weed control perspective. And other things that I like. 00:02:03 Kelly talked about this with you and the episode of the Grainery and it's neat, but the obvious first answer is, this is crazy 00:02:10 because everybody that's listening to this and their grandparents, all they've known really is monoculture. 00:02:17 You go out there, you plant this field to corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, whatever it should be. 00:02:22 This is kind of different. Is this something that you can actually see happening or is it just a cool experiment for field days? 00:02:27 Kelly Garrett? No, it's something I can actually see happening as land costs rise, uh, 00:02:32 as margins diminish, things like that. Uh, the idea that we could do two things out there at once, uh, the relay cropping is a great idea. 00:02:40 Uh, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to do some of it on my acres. So far what I've done is, uh, you know, like we're trying 00:02:47 to double crop scenario with, uh, wheat in the cows or oats in the cows. Now I'd like to put something in with the oats 00:02:54 that is gonna grow under the oats. I'll harvest the oats. The cows can go out there sooner. We're, we're putting, putting some cover crops out sooner, 00:03:00 things like that to try to have more cow feed when we grow that. Um, I have cows in a lot of my rotation. 00:03:06 Jason is talking about plants and uh, I would be interested to do something in the wheat. But yes, as land costs go up, ways to get more, 00:03:14 more dollars out of that acre or very relevant, It's more work there. I'm just going through all of the naysayer stuff mm-hmm. 00:03:22 That you hear Mr. Mark. Um, it's actually, it's actually less work. And the thing that I always tell people is, 00:03:29 how much does it cost you to do nothing? Because you have a variety of things. You have weeds that you know, are hip high in some 00:03:36 of these fields and they burn 'em down and then they're gonna have to post. Or you got the clean farmers doing tillage multiple times 00:03:42 or spraying multiple times. You've gotta do something to your acre. So when I look at that invoice, I spent $11,000 on wheat 00:03:49 and I got over 400 acres out of that 11,000. So my seed cost on average is $25. And I think we're gonna average about 90 00:03:56 to a hundred bushel wheat, even though the price sucks. If my cost of goods, you know, is, uh, a hundred dollars an acre, that's $400 contribution margin. 00:04:05 But the, the work that I've put in is how do we actually grow as good or better soybeans in this situation, uh, of relay cropping. 00:04:13 And that's been my 10 years of work. And, you know, what we've really arrived at is we're planting ultra early wheat. 00:04:20 So it comes off about a week earlier. Uh, we're planting really low seeding populations, which will block the wind, catch water, 00:04:27 but there's a point where when you plant a thin enough, it doesn't really pull down the beans. And that's kind of what we found. 00:04:34 We're not chasing a big wheat yield, we're chasing that, you know, 80 to a hundred bushel wheat on 00:04:40 about half the cost. And if You're, if you're watching this video, um, if you're listening to this on audio, I encourage you 00:04:47 to watch the video because we're putting up pictures right now so you can kind of see what this looks like. 00:04:52 So for those, you talked about populations, but just for the person that's trying to get it mm-hmm. In your head that's driving their 00:04:57 tractor or truck right now. Yeah. It's how many feet of one crop, then the next crop and the next crop, just so we can kind 00:05:03 of visualize it if you're listening and not watching. Yeah, I, I always struggle on how to clearly state this. 'cause we've changed from year to year, 00:05:11 but for a while we were using 60 inch blocks of wheat. So the wheat strips are five feet apart. We've since went to 45 inch wheat. 00:05:19 So we're planting less rows. And when we plant it with a planter, we can cingulate it versus a drill. 00:05:26 Or a lot of people are broadcasting their wheat and they're planting like 2.5 million seeds or, or maybe even a million and a half. 00:05:34 So a lot of our seeding rates are 300, 400,000. And what we found is, um, when you plant less seed, the plants adapt. 00:05:43 Um, they, you get your plant yield goes through the roof. And that's what we leverage is we're, 00:05:49 we're forcing the plants to adapt, not worried about maximizing the curve. And what that brings back to the farmer is, 00:05:57 is our input costs go down and, and, and, and you can ask questions that kind of lead me along. But why I am really interested in it is I use weeds 00:06:05 as we con as weed control. They are going to grow and I know that it will die. Mm-hmm. And me knowing that it'll die and grow aggressively in April 00:06:15 and May allows me to now take off, not only do I not have to manage these acres, the 400 acres, I don't have 00:06:22 to make any applications, uh, but my weed pressure goes down substantially when I'm not hitting, uh, you know, getting light directly down 00:06:30 to the ground and heating it up and, and, you know, having water hemp and all these issues that I have 00:06:36 to go out there and post spray Kelly, by the way, the person, because you know, you, you're the farmer. 00:06:43 I I try to think like a farmer when I'm listening to this. Obviously the first response is gonna be, 00:06:48 well wait a minute, you got wheat, then you got soybeans, you got wheat, you got soybeans. 00:06:52 Uh, if I wanna go out there and spray my soybeans with a herbicide treatment and uh, wheat doesn't come off until June 27th. 00:06:58 'cause you said what? Normally around here in our part of the world, wheat comes off July 1st to the 15th. Right. And you're peeling it off before this. Yeah. 00:07:06 But the point is, there's gonna be everybody saying, yeah, but your soybeans and they're gonna need a treatment 00:07:10 before July 1st. So what do you do? So, so this is the whole thing, like if you have a carnivore diet 00:07:17 and you're healthy, like you don't have to worry about gonna the doctor, if you don't have canopy, you don't have to worry about weeds. 00:07:23 So we're actually solving the derivative of the whole problem, which is canopy and we're just speeding it up. 00:07:28 So we are using chemistry, but we're laying it down in March, a product called ua. And we're putting about a third of a rate of two four D just 00:07:37 to clean up if we have anything from leftover from the fall. But with that two and a half ounces of ua, 12 ounces 00:07:43 of Salvador, that's a $12 app. That rain pushes it down and we get so much more longevity out of the product because it's not getting solar degraded, 00:07:53 the ground's not as hot. And the soil just has similar dynamics to weather. Um, you know, this time of year when the sun comes up 00:08:01 and it's humid, that sparks thunderstorms. Same thing with weed pressure. If we get direct light down to the ground, 00:08:07 the ground warms up 90 or a hundred degrees. Yeah, it makes your corn green, but it's gonna spark every, you know, 00:08:13 every weed in the seed bank and we're just, we're we get out ahead of it and grow what we want. And that's the whole point. 00:08:21 So no, no herbicide on the soybeans other than a March application of something to, to take care of winter annuals and then something that, uh, 00:08:31 has residual. That's it. Yes. Yep. Alright. Kelly, can you make this work? Yeah, I believe so. You 00:08:39 know, the, uh, the Weekend, wait, Jason, does it work on land that you need a chairlift to get up and down 00:08:45 because he, that's his fields. Can you do the, can we do this on 40% slopes? Oh, easily. Uh, you know, the whole thing is we're, 00:08:53 we're harvesting the wheat fast, but we're like 18 inches off the ground. So my wear and tear on the combine is minimal 00:09:00 and it's pretty easy to float, um, that high, you know, off the ground. We're not trying to shave the rocks and all this stuff. 00:09:06 Like we are on other crops. Now you gotta come in and run beans, but you, you're running beans on your acres anyway. 00:09:13 And were you run soybeans? Yeah, go ahead. Well, where you run over the soybeans, I, I think I've read you feel like they 00:09:19 branch out and things like that. You don't see a lot of damage. Well, I don't run over anything. 00:09:23 So everything, you know, this is 10 years in, so I've, I've created a controlled traffic system for my corn with 40 inch rows that we wire drop in fungicides. 00:09:31 We're not running over anything except where we turn every 60 feet. And then on our wheat, we have a wider wheat block 00:09:37 where the combine tires are. So we take off the duals and we put a single 900 tire on our seven 80 and we got spacers to be dead nuts, like to the, to the inch 00:09:47 that mirrors that wheat block. And then I've got beans planted right up to the inch so that, you know, 900 tires, like 31.4 inches. 00:09:55 I've got beans set at like 36 inches. Yep. And that's my widest block. And what we've done is we've taken a drill 00:10:02 that we can condense the row units, and I've got seven inch beans planted at a decent population, normal mono crops, 00:10:11 but I'm indexing all the beans right away from the wheat right in the center. So I manipulate 00:10:17 and place my plants where they're gonna canopy a little bit quicker. Uh, the ground's hotter, you know, 00:10:23 walk on the beach in the summer it gets hot because there's no moisture and the wheat sucks water outta the ground. 00:10:28 But that's just kind of the snake that we ride is kind of figuring out, you know, how to do it. But, uh, we, we do not do much damage whatsoever. 00:10:36 And now that we're going to a 40 foot draper head instead of our old 25 foot head, 00:10:41 then our turns are gonna be every 40 feet. But when we turn, we'll find the tram line again and actually turn down the tram line. 00:10:48 You were just going across the beans in a couple spots, which you're gonna get in the tram line before you turn back in, 00:10:52 Right? Yeah. So it's like 0.01%, you know, and yeah, if you run it over and you got an R two bean, it, it'll branch out 00:10:59 and put, you know, 216 pods on that one that next to the murder ones. You said that your rate on wheat, if it was on a per acre, 00:11:07 your seeding rate is 400,000 as opposed to one and a half to 2 million. So you're like at 20, 25% of 00:11:13 what a normal wheat population is. What's your population acre equivalent on soy? So we've, last year I planted 96,000. 00:11:21 I basically, I took 1 45 on twenties and I, and I didn't plant one out of every three, so I'm at 94, but I was, all my plants were eight inches off the wheat. 00:11:32 And we went through June, we had 25 inches, 25 days without rain, they got kind of dry. So we, we actually increased that a little bit. 00:11:39 And I've noticed I've done these experiments with this context called, uh, zero spacing, where I just literally broadcast soybeans 00:11:47 and cultivated it to see the circumstances of each bean and the beans grow so much better right in the middle of the row. 00:11:55 But you can't have the rows of wheat so narrow because it's 45 inches tall and it'll canopy shut and then the beans die and they, you get nothing out of it. 00:12:03 So it's, it's been this learning curve of, okay, we need to get it wide just enough so it allow, you know, 00:12:08 a little bit of light down like 10 inch corridor, plant all your beans right in that corridor when we're planting them about, 00:12:14 we planted 160,000 this year beans. So we kind of raised that up two to our prior point. Can we have that chemistry hold us all the way past harvest? 00:12:25 And the, and the way that we can kind of cheat is we take all the beans that we would plant on the whole acre 00:12:30 and we put 'em all exactly where we want, and then the wheat grow the stick, and then we'd get the canopy like May 15th instead 00:12:37 of a regular bean field. A lot of times, like July 5th or 10th, By the way, the, uh, the person that's listens to this, 00:12:46 we got people that really like to do creative stuff the first year. They wanna try this that just so that I know, okay, 00:12:54 this the, the width of wheat and then, and then there's nothing within the wheat and then a width of soybeans and then a width of wheat. 00:13:01 Right? So tell me again, right dimensions, how many inches of wheat? How many inches of soy? 00:13:04 So we've got two 15 inch rows of wheat, but we don't plant a row. So we got a 30 inch gap. 00:13:10 So that makes the wheat 45 inches on center. So imagine you fill up your 15 inch planter with wheat and then you skip every third row. 00:13:20 Okay. So in that skip, we put three to five soybean rows right in the center of that 30 inches. Okay. The wheat will suck up all the water 00:13:30 that it possibly can 10 inches outside the wheat root. So we wanna be 10 inches off the wheat root plant as many beans right in that space. 00:13:38 And they'll kind of grow in this bell curve. And when the wheat dies, it gets into this nursing home state 00:13:43 and it doesn't have much strength. And you've got this 15-year-old boy growing up as tall as the wheat head. 00:13:49 So it'll actually push up against the wheat and it's, it's like canopy plus because it's not just canopy. 00:13:55 You've got shapes and you've got actually density in there. And before then we're getting airflow. 00:14:03 So your dew dries out faster so you don't get the head scabs. The blights. It's not this wet wool sock 00:14:08 that gets all the blights down low, you know, you can see the wind blowing the wheat and it's getting all that, 00:14:14 If you're just listening to this, you really got tune into the video because he's giving visuals 00:14:18 with his fingers about the planting. He's giving his visuals with his arms about, uh, the plant growth. 00:14:23 And they just did a thing where he, he, he panto Mimed. He was in a windstorm. It was some of the better, it was some 00:14:31 of the better video I've seen. He, yeah. Yeah. We had a 40, It was a little bit axle to be honest. 00:14:37 It was a little bit of an axle rose when Axle would kind of get into it. Yeah. I'm telling you what, dude, you're, 00:14:42 you're impressive showman. No, but how windy has it been some of these days, you know, 40 mile an hour wind 00:14:48 and you go down to the ground where the beans are and there zero wind. Yeah. So we're not gassing off all this moisture. Yeah. 00:14:55 So it's kind of, it, it is just very interesting. All the little microclimates you see out there we're, you know, we're preserving moisture at the same time 00:15:02 as we're, we're kind of sucking it out. So it just, between the fibrous roots and all the infiltration, it's just, 00:15:09 it's not just about the the game, it's, it's, there's this long term play here where we're, we're adding organic matter, our corn's getting better. 00:15:18 I mean, it's just, there's a lot of good stuff to, it's, yeah. Let's Talk about, I wanna talk about the benefits of it, 00:15:22 because then we're gonna get into Kelly's thing about regenerative and, and you know, the direction he wants to go with soil health and then the 00:15:29 nutrients, et cetera, et cetera. Alright, before I do, I wanna remind you that if you farm, you need to think about growth. 00:15:34 You need to think about your business. You need to think about everything you can do from an infrastructure standpoint to keep your 00:15:39 operation moving smoothly. Superior grain equipment's, grain storage systems are built to make your job easier as a farmer. 00:15:45 And they can also help your grain reach its full potential. You might be losing grain quality based on your 00:15:49 system that you have right now. From gentle mix flow dryers to durable storage. Get the flexibility to market your grain on your timeline 00:15:57 can visit with the experts from Superior Grain Equipment at this year's Farm Progress show that's at the end 00:16:01 of August in Decatur, Illinois. Or you can visit them anytime online@superiorbins.com, superior bins.com. 00:16:09 Uh, all right. Agronomic benefits, et cetera, et cetera. Kelly, you're seeing it? 00:16:16 Oh yeah. I see the agronomic benefits here. The, uh, the collaboration of those roots. You know, a lot of times you talk about competition, really, 00:16:24 we have better soil health when we have collaboration, we have better biodiversity, better biological life. Um, the, the regenerative here is, is really nice. 00:16:34 Gabe Brown wrote in his book, uh, dirt to Soil, which then I turned you on to all that, uh, kind of one of the godfathers of the whole regenerative movement. 00:16:40 He's not anti chemistry, he's anti tillage. He's, he's not, he's not organic. He's regenerative. I mean, and so when, when you point that out 00:16:48 and one of his big things is more than one species 'cause a natural habitat. Even the prairie, the native prairie where you live, Kelly, 00:16:57 uh, 200, 300 years ago, it wasn't just one species. There was Forbes and there was all these other things that were thrown out there. 00:17:04 This, this is only two, which is still, which is still better, which is still better than Monocropping. 00:17:11 I think Agronomically, I I think it's better agronomically. It's definitely better financially. Yeah. 00:17:15 Gabe isn't necessarily gets chemicals. Gabe was worried about going broke and he was trying to find a way to make a living. 00:17:20 Yeah, yeah. And gone down that path. And I would tell you that I'm not a conventional farmer. I probably farm weird. I love the statement. 00:17:28 I'm not a conventional farmer, but I also don't know that I'm regenerative. I, what I call it is we wanna farm in tune 00:17:33 with Mother Nature and we wanna make a living. And we're, that's simply what we're trying to do, is to follow the science, follow mother nature 00:17:41 and, uh, increase the ROI as much as possible. So the things Jason's talking about, it's less work. There's less chemical, which, uh, 00:17:49 which is then less cost is very, very attractive. And there's a bigger gross margin. There's a, you know, there's a bigger 00:17:55 gross profit at the beginning. Yeah. People think I'm nuts, but I make more money on it than I do corn. 00:18:00 And we go really good corn. I mean, we grow 250, 260 bushel corn all around here. And I mean, get your pencil out. 00:18:08 If I got four bucks in there and I'm two 50, that's 1250. If I can get 90 and 70, I'm making more revenue 00:18:13 and I'm spending less money. I've seen your, I've seen your post on Twitter on x whatever all the time. 00:18:19 And he's like, what if I get three quarters off a crop? Off half an acre? I mean, three quarters plus three quarters is one and a half. 00:18:26 I, yeah, I, it's, it's very sound logic. I can't argue with anything you're doing at all. And, uh, I take the things I, you know, our, 00:18:34 our conversations and things I read and I try to implement it here to, to increase that revenue, the, the double crop scenario, the relay crop scenario. 00:18:42 And like, and you know, really that's, you know, we, I need to use cover crops for erosion control, 00:18:47 conservation, things like that. The fact that that helps me with the carbon credits is great, 00:18:52 but I need to use 'em for the erosion control. Well, cover crops are viewed as an expense to put out there. And at my northern latitude, a lot of times, 00:19:00 and especially when you want to be dry, we don't get a lot of germination from 'em. 00:19:05 So now, you know, this is TJ Cardis from Bio Till another sponsor and a good friend of mine talked about putting the 00:19:11 cover crops out sooner. And then in our conversations with you, I equated that over to relay cropping cows and corn. 00:19:18 So, oh yeah, we're gonna start, we're gonna start next week putting cover crops out in like V six corn, V five corn where we, we've, 00:19:26 we've changed the chemical package. So we don't have as what we would call as long a tail. We've shorted up the residual on that 00:19:33 and we're gonna seed out cover crops. TJ has helped us, uh, pick species of plants that will provide good cattle feed 00:19:42 but won't compete with the corn. And we're gonna put those out there hopefully in June, you know, putting those out mid-June, 00:19:49 we'll get a lot better germination and growth on the cover crops than we would waiting to like, you know, have the airplane seed 'em at, at uh, 00:19:56 tassel time or something like that. A lot of times then it's so hot, so dry, the canopy of the crop, you just don't get the germination. 00:20:03 So this year, my first step in your direction is to relay crop cows and corn. Cool. And the thing with, uh, and 00:20:11 You don't do it because of livestock. And that's the other thing that someone's gonna say, Mr. Mock doesn't have, he's not doing this because of erosion, 00:20:17 because generally his ground is zero to 4% slope. Right. Right. And you're not doing it because you have grazing cattle. 00:20:25 You don't have cattle, uh, you have confinement hogs. So those aren't the reasons you're doing it purely because you'd say it was an experiment 00:20:32 and then there's the agronomic benefit and then there's more importantly, it actually makes you money. 00:20:37 Yeah. And makes organic matter. And, and I have an ulterior motive. I'm 44 years old. If I can build up my farm until I'm 60, 00:20:44 throw more fertility out there, have more carbon, more oxygen, then my farm ground's gonna be better. And when I want to take it a little easier, 00:20:52 I've got my investments, you know, gonna crank out a little bit more. So that's, that's what I'm seeing 00:20:57 where we started this 10 years ago. You can literally see it on Google Earth. Like you can literally see the blackness of the soil. 00:21:04 So I know it's doing cool, cool things. And I wanted to add two little thoughts for Kelly, uh, as far as cattle. 00:21:10 So I'm seeding my cover crop with a combine and grandpa called it Harvest Loss and he cussed it and he's like, oh, just get that damn combine set 00:21:18 'cause there would be green after I ran the beans. But, uh, there's a farmer in Colorado, Brad Wingfield, and he's turning on his pivot 00:21:25 irrigation right after harvest. And he is growing that volunteer wheated up about like this. And that's about a 16% protein source. 00:21:32 But also he's got beans a, a bushel or two of beans out there that he can wetten and make more palatable. 00:21:38 And he's getting bigger gains, putting his cattle out after relay cropping. He is getting 90 bushel wheat, 00:21:44 80 bushel beans under irrigation in Colorado. And he's gaining tons of pounds. He's scaling this, I don't know how many acres, 00:21:50 it's like six or 800 acres now that he's grazing and getting three gains in that same year. I always have wheat going out the back of the combine 00:21:57 because traditionally we always wanna shave the ground because we wanna take in all the straw. Yeah. Well then if you're gonna hit all the wheat, 00:22:04 then your sample quality goes down because you got a straw coming in. So I'll set the combine a little looser 00:22:09 to keep the sample quality good. And I probably got two bushel going out the back and we're growing that cover crop. 00:22:14 I agree. Yeah, we do the same. We do the same thing, but it's because the straw to us is worth a hundred dollars a ton. 00:22:20 Yeah. Right. Yeah. I wanna keep the straw out. I think that is a big lever for us. Uh, building organic matter. 00:22:27 I know it's all in the roots, uh, but that thatch man, I've got all these little carbon straws mm-hmm. And it creates the best, most filthy soil 00:22:35 to plant corn into. And we're doing this, uh, concept called s springing, where we're not spraying anything in the fall. 00:22:42 We've got this volunteer wheat, we'll hit the, hit it with a vertical tillage tool about three inches deep at a six 00:22:48 degree angle, and we'll, uh, shoot out maybe two thirds of the wheat plants. But the ones that stay are like this big in October. 00:22:55 So the time I get to late April, I've got wheat plants like 20, 25 inches tall, but there's only say 50,000 of 'em out there. 00:23:04 And I plant corn right into it. And uh, and then that allows me to just spray at one post. And my herbicide program just continues to go down and down. 00:23:13 And we're not using glyphosate on that whole side of the rotation as well. We're just doing a little bit of tillage with a lot 00:23:19 of residue and we're holding that with a, uh, residual. So it's just, So that's what I was gonna ask you a 00:23:24 year, on a year after this. You're not no-till, you're minimal till and and reduction of, uh, herbicide. 00:23:30 Yeah. We wanna take, so we got a lot of carbon, 80 to one carbon. So when you compare this to a cover crop 00:23:37 and I kill it when it's like 15 to one carbon, I'm not getting this huge load of carbon in my system. So if I can get it to harvest, harvest that's 80 00:23:45 to one carbon and nitrogen ratio, that's a lot of carbon, which can actually be a deterrent and a nitrogen suck. 00:23:52 So we wanna kind of take at an angle and kind of throw some of that wheat straw to kinda level the field out 00:23:58 and kind of have that two inch little, uh, thatch, like quasi thatch cover crop layer. And we found a 10 to 20 bushel yield increase on our corn. 00:24:07 And just how we set this up is I've done all these high yield plots 'cause I sold seed and I wanted, you know, 300 bushel in the 00:24:15 plot to sell more seed. And what we found in 20 inch rows is our early maturities would always win a hundred, 506 day. 00:24:23 And they would be, oh, you gotta try this 114 day, well in 20 or narrow inch corn. It just doesn't have enough space for the plant to leaf out. 00:24:31 So we found upright early maturity planted about 38 or 40,000. We can shell like, you know, half 00:24:37 of our corn in mid-September and be done by Halloween before it gets all muddy. And we're out there, you know, screwing our fields up. 00:24:45 So everything is just kind of a tool to make it easier for us, convenient and farm well, but fast and timely. And uh, one other point, uh, 00:24:56 and I really want to put this idea in your head, Kelly, uh, me and Zach have been working on 00:25:01 how can we put the most corn in a five foot block? So I've got four 20 inch rows and the outside are 80,000, the inside are 50, 00:25:10 and I think we can get nearly the same yield with these big alleyways. Zach has twin sixties with a low population 00:25:16 tall hybrid in the middle. And what we want to do is if the corn is 11 or 12 foot tall, pick these big tall hybrids, 00:25:24 we can take now 12 to 15 feet between these blocks and grow like oats. Something really cheap. 00:25:30 Oats are low population, 15 inch wheat. Now throw clover out there and now two thirds or three quarters of the landscape is cheaply managed, 00:25:39 but it sets up a venue, an amazing venue for you to graze cattle. So if we can figure out how to get like six 00:25:45 or 800 bushel corn in that 60 inch block because of the lever mechanism where all 12 feet of the sidelight is, is, is introduced 00:25:54 and we manage that, then now we can get like, you know, 70, 80% of the corn revenue on the acre. 00:26:00 Additional revenue, revenue. That's a factor of like 1.3 because most of the landscape is in oats or wheat, 00:26:08 but it's, it's quicker. So it's green and growing in the spring. So if we can figure out where we can get, you know, 00:26:13 like 60% oat and wheat yield and then 80% corn yield and then have clover to graze, we've just opened the doors up not only to graze, 00:26:22 but now I can take our manure equipment out there and apply manure in the summer. And that's what we're looking at. 00:26:27 This is what this is all about, is changing the shape of photos, synthe capacity, and have a multiple plants and diversity and sequencing these plants so 00:26:35 that each plant has a competitive advantage for a time. And, and I think this makes more sense than anyone for you, Damien, 'cause you're a landscaper seeing specimen plants 00:26:45 and how well a tree grows by itself or a bush. That's what we need to be doing with our crops. Instead of this idea like our hog barns putting like 6,000 00:26:53 pigs in a hog barn and then just giving 'em a ton of meds, like, because it's asked to nose 00:26:57 and that's what we're doing with all these crops. We're trying to find this high point on yield, but we could get so much more out 00:27:04 of them if we just gave him a little bit of light and some, some room to breathe than sequencing them. Kelly, he just, he just compared, uh, intensive mono 00:27:14 monocropping, which is essentially what modern agriculture's been doing since, uh, you know, since your grandpa's out there doing it 00:27:21 and you just compare it to confinement, uh, hog operations. And there might be something to that. What do you think 00:27:27 We're pushing 'em way if our pigs will grow so much better if there's half of 'em in there. They, they do well, but it just seems like we're always just 00:27:33 putting more and more and more and more into 'em. And, and that's what we see in ag is if you got more plants out there, you're gonna have more black tar 00:27:40 and you're gonna have, and it's just like this input spiral, which is great for, 00:27:45 For ag, it's great for ag retailers, it's great for ag retailers is not so great for the operator. Yeah. More, more seed does not always equate to more yield. 00:27:52 Uh, and there is more disease pressure. And I've never heard the analogy before, but it's a very apt analogy. 00:27:57 More people in a space, more hogs in a space, more corn plants in a space leads to more disease. Yeah. As said, it's asked to know he's right. 00:28:05 Yeah. So here's the thing, most people are never gonna do this because a, it's different and it's change 00:28:11 and it sounds like work. Um, what I think the hard work is the planting. 'cause after that it gets easy. But when you're doing two 00:28:18 rows of this and four rows of that and all this, that's, that's, and also resetting your wheels Now that you can, now that you can save the auto, 00:28:25 the auto steer and the line. I mean, it's not, yeah, it's not working. You know, like we're now running the same planters in the 00:28:31 fields because it picks up each other's auto steer lines and shutoffs work. The technology's there. Now, this isn't more work. 00:28:37 I've got a 36 row, 20 inch planter and I can shut rows off. I can change their population, their starter per row, 00:28:45 and I can go in the field. I've already thought this through my head hit a few buttons for like four minutes and I'm doing just 00:28:50 reverse cowgirl stuff. You know, it's just very easily and it's just a few buttons. He didn't talk with his hands as much on that one. 00:28:58 Um, so here's the thing. When I'm, when I'm thinking about doing this, when I'm thinking about doing this, um, 00:29:07 what did you, how'd you start? How'd you start? Well, I started being a landscape contractor and instead of, I saw all these people spending 20, 00:29:16 50,000 in the yellow book, and I'm like, I'm just gonna make my s**t look better than them. 00:29:20 So it became this prideful of like, let's make these four arrangements amazing. So to be able to do that, I need to crocuses and daffodils 00:29:28 and pansies and then summer flowers and cans and salvias. And I had all these plants that were different sequenced. 00:29:33 So when I came to the farm and we're just like, torch the earth and grow this one thing and I'm killing water, hemp 00:29:39 and all this s**t, I'm just like, let's get some freaking control out here. And that's what a landscape contractor is. 00:29:46 We grow the grass really thick and tall and mulch and plants and we can manage hundreds 00:29:50 of acres beautifully just through canopy. So it just became, you know, my dad got pancreatic cancer, so I went from running about a $600,000 landscape business 00:30:00 to being in charge of farming 3000 acres. And it just didn't make any damn sense of how, uh, how we were going about it. 00:30:07 Um, so it, it just came into pain points. My dad, his big thing, it's okay to screw up, you're learning, but let's not do it again. 00:30:14 And you get any situations where you have a wet spring, you've got weeds and you're just like, what the hell are we doing here? 00:30:20 Mm-hmm. And, and that's what it is to me, is it's protection. It's it's thinking ahead and all this s**t. 00:30:26 You really do have to think, you know, 2, 3, 4 years ahead to set it up. I'm, I'm, uh, Kelly, go now as the farmer. 00:30:35 I mean, it is, it is weird. It is farming weird, but it's actually, I, I see so much of this that if you would just, you know, what's the, think 00:30:43 outside the box, all those cliche terms, but first off, there's the reduction of inputs from the cost standpoint. 00:30:50 Mm-hmm. There's the environmental benefit from the reduction of inputs because the Jason's point, 00:30:54 that's the other thing about going away and coming back to the farm. I would, I, I sat in Kelly's combine. 00:30:59 I said the, I said, no financial person would do what farmers do, would put this much, allocate this much money into 00:31:07 something with such low margin. And then also sometimes, you know, you say, well what choice do I have? 00:31:14 Well do something like this And, and let me add one more thing to it. It, it's not just farming cost, but 00:31:20 Your cost per acre. Your allocation of capital Yeah. Is, but right now I'm y dropping and I get a lot of scrutiny when IY drop two or three times. 00:31:29 And my point is, we're kind a freaking quarter million dollars check for nitrogen. What if it rains five inches tonight? Yeah. 00:31:36 You know, what if, why are we, why is it like, that's why I went to tram lines and people were just like, why you don plant that row? 00:31:42 That gets expensive. I'm like, no, I, we spent a half a million on nitrogen if I don't get that right, that's expensive. 00:31:48 Mm-hmm. And it's, you know, we've gotta just make room to do more like closer to the, to the right time to make the right decision. 00:31:57 Everything needs to be a lot. Tone the music down a little bit. Temple With everything. Temple 00:32:03 Has put tram lines in his field and he wants to be able to get his hagy out there later in the year to be able to spray 00:32:10 or it's not, hey, it's a sprayer. He cannot get over top of the tall corn. So he has put short corn in mm-hmm. Every time. 00:32:17 And then his sprayer can make the passes. He, he put the tram lines in with the shorter corn. I thought it was ingenious just 00:32:23 to build, get out there for the So he's in the belly. Put the short. Yep. Yeah, I did that on my plot. I cheated. 'cause you would game like 10 or 20 bushel having a little 00:32:32 Gary Coleman as your check. You get a little carrot, you get a little carrot on the, there it is. Kelly 00:32:38 In the grainery, he referenced 1980s comedic B actors. And now he just referenced 1970s and early eighties sitcom actors. Gary Coleman, 00:32:48 I think Gary Coleman hybrids out there is gonna allow more sunlight in the field. And I, uh, temple and I would, we talked about that. 00:32:55 He might see some yield gain just from the sunlight. And here's what I would do if you're not, if you can't do winter wheat, find some 00:33:02 of this midget like 80 day corn and you could run the, the corn just like my wheat blocks. And you could go out there in late August, combine early, 00:33:11 early, early corn and then push the beans down, grow like four, six beans that are green as a gore for another six weeks. 00:33:19 And I mean there's a all kinds of different ways to think outside the box and make a lot more money just using the 00:33:26 Pareto distribution of, of, of plant yield. That might be something that I would try, you know, like I keep, I was sitting here thinking about it 00:33:33 with the episode coming up. We're gonna tape it about how I, how and where I would try the wheat and the beans. 00:33:39 I think I would try the corn and the beans. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? How you cheat there like super herb early. 00:33:45 And it has, it has the show a lot of the year you're making more photosynthetic capacity out there. 00:33:51 And I think there's something too, uh, the nitrogen share with soybeans as an understory. 00:33:56 I mean it's full of nodules. It's doing something. Yep. Yeah. So from an economic standpoint, 00:34:02 you're putting less in per acre. And then obviously you got the, and that's throughout the season. 00:34:06 And then obviously from the environmental story, which is a good one to tell. You're, you're decreasing, 00:34:11 you're dec decreasing, not just herbicide. You're decreasing applied synthetic fertilizer too. Right, Exactly. And 00:34:17 you know, one thing to think of, farmers get paid commission on the water that we sell. We get paid 15% commission on the grain 00:34:25 and there's not a metric for sunlight and CO2, but that's basically what we do. And we have that five inch rain 00:34:31 about six or eight weeks ago. And this whole pla I could have jet skied anywhere, like there was water everywhere if you, 00:34:37 I mean it was just here, there and everywhere. And my wheat fields were dry as a bone. There wasn't any water coming off those fields. 00:34:44 So it's just, we got it. Not at like Kelly, how much rain do you get? 25, 30 inches a year? 00:34:51 Yeah. 35. Yeah. I mean we, if you look at our 20 year average, it's crawled now up to 47 inches per year. 00:34:58 And there's a lot of fifties in there. You know, there's a 62 in there. Mm-hmm. You, you have gotten wetter 00:35:03 and we have gotten drier. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So this, then the question is how does this help on the moisture on managing moisture? 00:35:12 And it's just because you think you're, because you don't have many plants to suck it up. You just think that they're, they're 00:35:17 thriving more. Is that why you're, Well, when do our crops look like s**t in Indiana on a wet spring? 00:35:23 Yeah. Yeah. I mean this literally takes, draws 10 to 15 inches of water outta the ground 00:35:29 before even the mono crops even even are sprouted. So it just puts you in a completely different situation. Situation. Alright, so why you should consider, 00:35:39 we said why you should consider relay cropping. First off, you invented the term, you're the only person I've heard talk about relay cropping. 00:35:44 So the point is, we made the economic case, we made the environmental case. Now you just made the farm ability case. 00:35:51 And then someone's gonna say, well I, this won't work for, because we farmers will just say, it won't work here. 00:35:55 So I don't get 45 inches of rain or 42 inches like Damien and Jason do on average. 00:36:00 Um, I don't need to do this. But you'd say, okay, so the the, You have to plant a hundred thousand 00:36:06 seeds, block the wind. I mean that's, we've gotta start looking the attributes of everything. Oh God. 00:36:11 Now he's got another visual. He just grabbed a watermelon. He just grabbed a watermelon. 00:36:16 If you are just listening to this, you have to watch the video. That's some good stuff right there. That's good tv. 00:36:21 Yeah. But seriously, everyone just looks at the attributes of things and they're just like, Hey, 00:36:26 this is an eight eight inch green watermelon. But we gotta start looking the attributes and okay, these beans have nodules. 00:36:32 Okay, this wheat will die. Okay, this wheat is this tall. And actually turn the attributes 00:36:38 that people are just blank stare into value for the farmer. And the value is being to walk away 00:36:44 or not apply herbicide here or ban your nitrogen only here so we can get crop response. The same crop response. 00:36:53 If I plant, you know, a third of the rows, I can put, you know, 1.2 as much fertilizer on a third of the rows and I'm putting less her. You see where I'm getting at? 00:37:03 By the way, You're your way to everything. I wanna Go to Kelly. 'cause it goes back to the confinement. 00:37:08 Our, our way of thinking in agriculture has always been more, more, more, more cows in the freestyle barn. More, more hogs in the confinement barn 00:37:16 and then pump, like Jason said, yeah, you gotta medicate the hell outta 'em. 'cause you get more disease pressure. 00:37:20 This and, and then it's, it is natural. You drive by this field and say, well you're not using all those acres that's, 00:37:26 that's $350 cash rent ground and you're not using all those acres. That seems silly. It's not about quantity, 00:37:33 it's about then the return. I think that's, that's the hard part to get your head around Kelly. Am I right? 00:37:37 Yes. Well he is, you know, rather than putting one mono cropp on the field, more of one mono cropp on the field, he, 00:37:45 he's still putting more on the field. It's just two different species of plants. And he takes the disease out, 00:37:50 he takes the weed pressure out. Uh, it, it's just more from a different perspective and it really works. 00:37:56 Alright. You gonna do this next year? Yeah. Oh, I'm on it. Oh, CA Kelly. Yeah. Are you talking to 00:38:01 Me or Yeah, yeah. I Wanna know. Hey, we already know that. We already know that. We already know that, uh, 00:38:06 Gallagher do it over here, by the way. I do. I I feel damn near, like I've just sat through a Gallagher show. 00:38:12 I mean, if the next time we do a recording, if he not only brings a watermelon, but he is on roller skates and has a sledgehammer, I swear 00:38:18 to God the show is complete. That's this good. That's A great analogy with the shirt that he is got on the white t-shirt 00:38:24 and then grabbing a watermelon. It's very much a Gallagher episode. I, I I can see it. Yeah. So I would like to try something like this next year. 00:38:32 You know, we're, we're doing the, uh, cows and corn this year with the earlier and, uh, I would like to, you know, wheat 00:38:38 and soybeans, the corn and soybeans, something like that. I think it'd be great to, uh, give it a shot 00:38:43 to increase margin on the acre Farming. Weird. Why you should consider relay cropping. Um, if you're hearing this 00:38:50 before, Jan, uh, June 21st, the field day in Delaware County, Indiana, Gaston, Indiana, uh, is June 21st. I'm signed up. I'm gonna be there. It's an all day affair. 00:39:02 If you wanna learn more about Jason's Field Day, where do they go? Uh, they just, the easiest thing is Google 00:39:08 Jason Mock Field Day. But it's on that acres website. Um, you gotta get a ticket. You can have, uh, either the regular ticket, 00:39:15 it'll get you in, or there's a VIP for a nice dinner, a round of golf at my golf course, which you still need to do that 00:39:23 I still need to do. I still need to be there. I need to do that. All right. Yeah. I get there. And golf. In fact, 00:39:27 that's another thing I could beat Kelly Garrett at. So we've got wrestling chin up competition golf. I, that's one thing you said the word 00:39:36 I picked up on the word another. That's one thing. Anyway, his name's Jason Mock. He's the farm weird guy. Check him out on, uh, on Twitter X. 00:39:44 He's got really good stuff. And then also I encourage, if you're listening to this, you gotta watch. I'm telling you, I feel like I I I should have brought 00:39:51 Visqueen for when the watermelon gets smashed on me. That's how close to the Gallagher show this was Till next time. 00:39:56 That's Kelly Garrett. That's Jason Mock. I'm Damien Mason with Extreme ags Highly entertaining show, cutting the curve. 00:40:03 That's a wrap for this episode of Extreme Ag Cutting the Curve Podcast. Make sure to check out extreme ag.com 00:40:09 for more great content. Cutting the curve is powered by Nature's Bio. Okay. Check out natures.com to learn more about how Bio Okay. 1046 00:40:17.665 --> 00:40:19.405