00:00 Hey there, fall of 2021. I sat down with this guy Kelly Garrett and asked him what is a major objective for you in the year 2022 crop season. He said stress 00:09 mitigation stress mitigation stress mitigation. He says as he said times that if 00:15 you give a plate of food and a bunch of nutrition to an unhealthy athlete the athlete does not benefit from it. So he said I think that we have unhealthy plants and 00:24 it's because of stress. I'm going to mitigate stress in the year 2022. Well here we are at the end of 2022 and we're asking 00:30 Kelly right now about that objective how it went and what he learned from making stress mitigation a major objective. 00:39 Welcome to extremeags cutting the curve podcast where you get a guaranteed return on investment of your time as we cut your learning curve 00:48 with the information. You can apply to your farming operation immediately extreme AG, we've 00:54 already made the mistakes so you don't have to managing. Your Farm's Water Resources is a 01:00 critical component to a successful and sustainable farming operation Advanced Drainage 01:06 Systems helps Farmers, just like you increase their yields up to 30% with their technologically advanced Water Management products visit ads 01:15 pipe.com to see how they can keep your business flowing. Now, here's your host Damien Mason. 01:23 Welcome to cutting the curve. It's the podcast and it's so much more than just podcast. It's an educational Forum. Let's face it for you to shorten your learning curve 01:32 put on by the great people of extreme AG. I'm Damien Mason sitting down here with one of the extreme AG Founders Kelly Garrett stress mitigation. 01:38 You said it again again? I liked it because they talk about Focus, you know, when political campaigns get too broad-based. It 01:48 becomes confusing when companies say we're this where that where this were that then they're nothing when you're everything that everybody you're nothing to nobody. So bring that 01:57 to your focus. You said number one objective is stress mitigation. Now, that doesn't mean you didn't still do the other stuff that you always done planting and field preparation and 02:06 all those things. You said we're gonna boil it down to one of the major overriding themes of 2022 is gonna be making 02:12 my plants less stressed. How did it go? It turned out to be a great year to focus on this because of the hot dry weather that persisted in the midwest. Yeah. So of all 02:24 the years when we say stress mitigation and we did a whole webinar on this for our paying members and Matt mile said something pretty smart. He said you got to 02:33 think about everything that you're doing to make a better crop really should be in the stress mitigation making the fertility 02:39 levels right reducing reducing sodium content, whatever that should be. So everything really boils down to stress mitigation, but not 02:48 the way we normally think about it. We'll talk about stress mitigation starting in the spring you use some stuff at time 02:54 of planting to reduce stress and they are accomplished Max from agerson or octane from 03:00 AG Explorer. Okay, and they are they go in Furrow. They go in Furrow and the idea there is what do they do? Why do you think that they why do 03:09 you think they make a crop less stress starting from the time of seed going to the ground it is there's metabolites 03:15 in these two products and That they're derived from seaweed. That's a very general term oversimplifying the term but the metabolites in 03:24 these products are then taken up by the crop and we see great. We see great things from it last year. The accomplished Max was 28 bushel and a 03:33 stressed environment. The octane is very similar. It'd be easy to say. Okay. There it is. I just handle my stress mitigation. I did something I dumped some stuff in when I drove 03:42 the planter across the field. I'm done but that's not where it is. No, that's not and now this year what we added on to the accomplished Max 03:48 and the octane is a product to products that we get from integrated AG Solutions. The first one is Shield. 03:54 Yep, which is basically like giving the crop an aspirin. Okay, and the second one is energized which is it's a 04:01 plant growth regulator a pgr. But what a plant growth regulator does is makes the car it makes the crop more efficient and any any system 04:10 be it a factory or a car or you know a motor a plant anytime you can make a system more efficient you are removing stress. I never 04:19 even heard of a plant growth regular until I joined up with extreme egg a year and a half ago. And now I've learned all about 04:25 it. You used it in your soybean test where you are reducing population of soybeans what also never thought you would do because I thought what do you mean more seeds more 04:34 plants more crops, but we know that's not True and you told me about a plant growth regulator and I thought you just got there and spray it with a plant started to get too big and and you said no. No, 04:42 it starts at time of planet. Right? We'll have plant growth Regulators either in Furrow or as a seed treatment. 04:48 We'll apply them again at post-cam. We'll apply them again at fungicide time. They're different the the first one the in the furrow seed treatment and the postcam. That's 04:57 the same product. That's Mega grow at at fungicide time. That product is energized plant growth Regulators are hormones and we need different hormones for different 05:06 times of the life. All right, then you start getting to yeah emergence your crop is up and then we started getting into May things were fine. And then in my 05:15 part of the world, which is too far from your part of the world. I'm in Indiana, you're in Iowa this big shot off a little 05:22 before Memorial Day. We got one point two inches of rain the entire month of June with a persistent 12 mile 05:29 an hour Southwest early wind that just essentially had the effect of a convection oven. Absolutely. 05:36 It so that's when you're thinking stress mitigation, but at some point stress mitigant products 05:42 can only do so much. You still need water. One of the things look like in Western Iowa for you at that point in time. It was very dry in June the week of July 05:51 3rd to 10th. We did receive three inches of rain, which carried us through we still didn't make proven yields. Yeah, you know, my my average proven yields about 2:15 our 06:00 corn this year was right about 200 198 to 200. Yeah was my average so I mean and that's seven that's a seven solid seven or eight 06:09 percent deduct off of normal and there's been lots of times when your entire margin might have been seven percent of the crop at best absolutely but distress 06:18 mitigation products. I've got some trials here some notes to share they performed very well. 06:25 All right, so I want to get to the products but I also want to talk about practices. So you will do a products first and practices are gonna do practices 06:31 first and practice is fine. All right. Well Matt says and I know I keep quoting him because he was 06:36 And in this webinar, we did about stress mediation and he said, you know, your practices 06:42 should be about maximizing your your output. But again much of that comes down to creating a less stressful environment. He needs 06:51 it. He needs it worse than you. It's a hundred. It was midnight and a hundred degrees in the Delta Region this summer. Absolutely the heat that Matt deals with is a whole nother 07:00 world. So he talks about practices that help what practices do you think? Okay, you're generally 07:06 a no-till to reduce till so that helps by conserving moisture. You know, I have a conserving moisture. We might have gotten through that tough June because 07:15 you're tillage or lack of tillage practices made it so that moisture still in the ground. Is that was that key to keeping your crops less stress this year? Yes. It 07:24 is. You know you back to 2012. I remember in the fall of 11. We did a decent amount of deep ripping vertical vertical tillage 07:33 and in 12 everywhere. That we that we blue jetted the corn didn't put an ear on it 2012 for those that are 07:42 listening to this that might not remember the years was a terrible drought year heat and drought year 07:48 through the entire cornbell. It was the worst drought of my life. Yeah. Yes. Yeah 88 was worse for us than than 12 07:54 but those the two that stick in your mind. So anyway, so some of your tillage are now not tillage 08:00 or very very reduced tillage practices. You think helped. What are the practices do you think you did pre and early 08:06 season that helped the cover crops help, you know, I think the general idea of cover crops is people think 08:12 well that plants growing it's removing moisture. It's drying the soil out. The opposite is true that cover crop shading the 08:18 ground holds the moisture there and it's much there's it's much better where the cover crop is than without wet and you just scared people and cover 08:28 crops. It's yeah soil moisture. There's soil moisture. Yeah. It isn't like it's money. Yeah, but the ground holds the moisture much 08:34 better. Yes, don't to cover crops because of that, right? Okay, so cover cropping help any other practices preseason or early season that you 08:42 think helped your help your plants be a little bit less stressed. Those the cover crop in the no-till. All 08:49 right, let's get the product. And another thing I never knew of until I joined up with extreme Agnes two by two. I didn't know what two by two was and then you talked about all the stuff that you put out and I'm like good God in 08:58 the old days. We put out fertilizer seed and insecticide the orange stuff the kind of is really really 09:04 nasty counter. And and that's what we put out. Now, you're putting like seven things out of time of planting. Yes, and you know, you could say the two by two with that fertility right there by 09:13 the plant that practice actually reduces stress because the plant isn't searching for the nutrients, especially when it's that dry. 09:19 It's a lot harder for those nutrients to move potassium. Especially doesn't move. Well without doesn't 09:25 move at all without moisture. All right. So when you talk about the planting, like I said, you're putting like seven things out there and a large part of that is I 09:34 know I've talked to our friends at least be called my own bio, but now it's called profarma I think is the name of the company that 09:40 maroon is morphed into and they kept talking about is the Mr. Miller with that company said prevent the bad day. 09:46 The bad day depending a bad day and Chad talks about that Chad Henderson extreme AG guy loves to experiment with stuff that he says look at 09:55 what the vegetable people are using. Look at what the special crop people are doing because they're always ahead of us Road crop type people and he 10:01 says preventing a bad day preventing a bad day the stuff that you did at time of planting prevented a 10:07 bad start. Absolutely it did. All right. So let's talk about your products. So the first product we have is Shield. Yeah, which is like given the crop an aspirin and that's from 10:16 our company that's from integrated X solution. Okay, right and we are applying Shield. I believe it's a 10:22 two ounce rate. The cost of Shield is only four dollars per acre and here's our trial and shield at 10:28 postcam. So when we you know, so you're not adding another application when you're going out and putting your postcam pass 10:34 on your corn it added nine and a half bushel. And the net return on that would in in today's market is $60.81. Okay. 10:43 So one product Shield at time of planning. Yep. No at post camp at post Camp. Okay. So when one is that for the person's listening 10:52 to this, you know, oh the first two weeks of June. All right. So yeah and your plan you're talking about a product of a corn those planted first person. 11:01 Yeah. Okay. So about four to six weeks into it is you're doing this shield and right the bump on that was what nine and a half bushel and you think that 11:10 that applied Is a single pass? Yes. So, you know when we're going out and we're putting on our chemical pass on the corner post chemical pass. 11:19 We add Shield to iterate a two ounces. All right, and it just it it's like giving the crop an aspirin. It has a three-week residual. Okay. So then that's 11:28 that's a pass that goes just there's herbicide in that mix and this stuff and and make it grow are our first pass of pgr. Okay 11:37 maker grow is a tight growth regulator and it goes into and that's that first pass that you went through there. You got your herbicide, which is necessary and then you got this. Yes 11:46 and and Earth regular right and this trial. The only thing that was removed for the check was the shield The Shield is that's the only variable nine and a half 11:55 bushel yield difference much more than what I expected. All right, then tell me what else you didn't wear a product. That's a big one. I do. It's you 12:01 said $60. It's a 15 to 1 return. That's huge. Yeah. So then what's our rule here at extreme agree to one if we get at least a three to one return on 12:10 the investment. We think it's worth doing and this is a five times that Absolutely. Yeah, so the other trial I have to share with you today 12:16 is on corn at fungicide time that so we have our grower standard practice. Which was a Fungicide and insecticide. Yep. Okay, 12:25 then we added the first pgr. We added the pgr first energize. Yeah that added 31 and a half bushel. 12:34 Energized over the grower standard practice for a net return of doing 203 dollars and eighty nine cents to be exact. 12:42 I think you have a hard time arguing that energize tell me what it does energize is a plant growth regulator. Yeah, that is hormones specifically geared or 12:52 engineered for Reproductive. Okay, so that's we're talking about putting that on at about 12:57 putting that on at tassel. Okay, so that that's a pass and what was in the entire mix on that one. We had our fungicide. Yep. Our insecticide what 13:06 we started with that. Yeah, then we added the energize. Yeah and the yield bump again 31.57 bushel, where's come from 13:15 energize comes from integrated egg solution. Yeah, and then you also through in Shield, which is another Integrated Solutions product. Yes, and 13:21 then you put in cave fuel I've seen here in your notes and that's from our friends and Natures. That's from our friends at nature. That's Tommy. Yeah, the 13:27 shield The Shield only provided another two bushel, but that added about nine dollars of Revenue. Okay, so of net revenue, so it had a 13:36 nine dollars an acre so and then the cave fuel so, you know first we went out with the fungicide insecticide then we made the energized then we added the shield to the energized 13:45 fungicide. Then we added the cave fuel on top of all of that. The K fuel was nine bushel better. 13:53 For about another $53 of net money. So the K Fuel and I this year the K fuel is about seven bucks an acre good so for 53 dollars, it's a 14:02 seven seven bucks to get 53. So all right and those things and we're not just pitching products here. We're talking the overriding theme the overriding objective and you're 14:11 Landing Cattle was stress reduction to make sure that you have healthy plants. Absolutely and you talked about agerson. We always talk about that when our in our spot that we do for the about the 14:20 whole thing that accomplished Max is something that you put in there. That's a stress mitigation. You didn't talk about them here. No with that 14:26 that is at planting. These were just our foliar trials or our post trials the agerson after last year, you know last year 14:32 and a high yield environment. The accomplished Max was 10 bushel the inner stressed area. It was 28 and 14:38 it became grower standard practice for us this year. It's on every acre got it. So that's that's important and the entire purposes. It's it's 14:44 makes your it's it gets your plants off to a good start. It's proven itself to me. Yes, so that's accomplishments my agerson and these other things right here anything 14:53 else on stress medication on the corn because we want to talk about the other crops. These are the trials that you know, we're in the middle of analyzing all 15:01 these trials. These are the two that we had done to share today. My belief is that you know, this is an estimation but my belief 15:07 is that we are wasting about 25% of our fertility budget. Yeah, because the plants are under so much 15:13 more stress on what we realize. Yeah, but that doesn't mean I think you should increase your budget to add these products. I think 15:19 you should decrease your fertility budget a little bit and put these in and look at the net return because that's what it's all about. Yeah. 15:25 You said that I think that you said that I quoted it that we probably have enough fertility in most cases. We're just not getting it inside the 15:34 plant that's where these Biologicals have their their value proposition is that we're gonna increase soil biology activity 15:40 which then breaks down the stuff and makes it more really available and it's the new frontier soybeans. We 15:46 didn't talk about anything on soybeans, you know soybeans do better when it's warm maybe than corn, but they don't like one point two 15:52 inches of rain for the whole month with 15 mile an hour 90 degree winds either. What about soybeans anything? You did with that the soybeans, you know, Mike is 16:01 in the middle of analyzing all these trials the one energized, you know, three trials on energize. It was a six eight 16:07 and ten bushel yield response on soybeans. Okay, but I don't have the stress mitigation information yet. Yeah, but you you still 16:13 have the same objective. It wasn't yet. It wasn't lost on you that you still think you can do a better job by decreasing the stress on 16:19 your soybeans as well. Absolutely. Okay, so anything else about the objective of stress mitigation that 16:26 you didn't share with me because it was a major objective for 2022 looks like it paid off it paid off 16:32 very very well exceeding my expectations. But again, it was a stressful year with the Heat and the lack of rain, but these things are these will become grower standard 16:41 practices. Now, they'll they'll just be there when we we look at then 2023, he'd say, 16:47 okay. Is there a new objective? Well, no. This one looks like this one can even be improved upon. It's pretty 16:53 damn good as it is it is I would tell you that next year. I hope that we're raising. 30 bushel corn instead of 200 right and I would 17:01 expect the payback on Shield to go down. Yeah, but I would expect the payback on energizing K fuel to go up because of the added bushels. But if we're raising more bushels, that 17:10 means there's a bit less stress. I'm still gonna put the shield in because we don't know but the the shield that the post 17:16 chem time maybe that payback won't be quite as much got it. So what we're talking about there is pretty simply these things 17:23 are getting closer to standard practice. Absolutely. They are I I really believe that you know, we we are wasting part of that fertility budget 17:32 because there's so much more stress than what we realize. Yeah, and you know, we talk about other things like 17:38 uneven emergence can be a stressful Factor because you got other plans trying to catch up with other plans. There's a lot of things that really are stressed that we in the 17:47 old days didn't even see us didn't recognize and Define as such. Yeah. All right, go to extreme agnot 17:53 farm for more great information follow us on Facebook and Twitter join us like a subscribe, etc, etc. 17:58 You know what? We're here to help you. It's Damien Mason. That's me. That's Kelly Garrett right there. It's extremags cutting 18:04 the curve and we're glad you're here. We know it was helpful stress mitigation major objective now. You've got the answers. Talk to you next time. 18:12 That's a wrap for this episode of cutting the curve, but there's plenty more check out extremeag.farm where 18:18 you can find past episodes instructional videos and articles to help you squeeze more profit out of your farm cutting. The curve 18:27 is brought to you by Advanced Drainage Systems the leader in agriculture Water Management Solutions.