Farming Financial Strategies Podcast | Smart Strategies from Commodity Classic 2025 with Kelly Garrett

00:00:00 Order. Kelly Garrett's key takeaways from Commodity Classic. He's gonna share them with you. Let me tell you, 00:00:04 it comes down to smart spend, particularly on fertility. That's what we're talking about in this episode 00:00:09 of Extreme Ag Cutting the curve. It's extreme ag cutting the curve podcast, cutting your learning curve, 00:00:14 and improving your farming operation every week. 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. 00:00:36 Hey there. Welcome to another fantastic episode of Extreme Ag Cutting the Curve. We got Kelly Garrett, one of the founders 00:00:40 of Extreme Ag on here. We were just together recently in Denver for Commodity Classic Extreme Ag has a 00:00:46 big presence at Commodity Classic. A lot of our business partners are at Commodity Classic. We do panels. Uh, 00:00:51 Kelly was on stage talking about sustainability with tying Morgan. Uh, we did a game show, the match game. 00:00:57 By the way, if you ever find yourself in a match game and you need to match with one of our celebrity farmers, don't pick temple roads. 00:01:05 The word was grain blank. And for $200, he says Grain Tank Kelly, if you ever, ever in your life called a grain tank, 00:01:15 it's a grain bin, right? Yes, I would agree. It's a grain bin, but that's temple. It makes you wonder then when he pulls up the tractor 00:01:23 to put diesel in it, does he call it the fuel bin? I mean, is it a grain tank and a fuel bin? I don't know. But anyway, we were there. 00:01:28 One of the big things that was an overriding theme is a smart spin. You know, you go to these conferences, these trade shows, 00:01:36 yeah, there's shiny equipment and there's a whole bunch of ways you can spend money on your farm. 00:01:39 But we know that the farm economy is a a little bit of a, in a, in a an a doldrum. 00:01:43 We got a, a tightening of the farm belt, and an overriding theme was how you can stay alive and survive in 2025. 00:01:50 You've found a few things. We were at the John Deere booth. We talked about planter technology. 00:01:54 You can apply to even an old planter and save money on the spend. Talked about for, uh, products you can use 00:02:00 to reduce fertility spend. We basically talked a lot about reducing the spend. And I want you to tell me, 00:02:05 when you came away from Commodity Classic, you're like, here's some things I'm doing on Garrett Land and Cattle to reduce spend, 00:02:11 Reduce the, one of the things would be on the planner, you know, if we should start there as you did, uh, John Deere has a, a new technology 00:02:20 and you can add it to an older planner, and it's called Exact Rate. And so with the, well exact rate is the Inferral program. 00:02:29 Exact Shot is the new add-on, pardon me. And so Exact Shot just shoots a concentrated, uh, shot of fertility on every seat. 00:02:39 So instead of dribbling five gallons an acre down the road like we've done for years, we're just gonna shoot that shot 00:02:45 of fertility on every seat. Seed drops, a fertility goes on, we go on to the next one. John Deere advertises a 66% savings 00:02:54 because of how tight they have the technology. You know, in years past, uh, I had some other technology that did much the same thing, and I realized a 40% savings. 00:03:03 Yep. So at first I was skeptical about the 66, but the John Deere technology, with their meters and things like that, they can dial it in so much closer 00:03:11 where it's all integrated That, uh, after watching it and discussing with them, I'm, I'm pretty, uh, stoked about it. 00:03:18 I I have a lot of confidence that it will be a 66% savings. Not hard to get $30 in your Inferral program. 00:03:25 Real Money now is 10 bucks when you save that two thirds of two thirds of the spend. 00:03:29 Yeah. So, and that's gonna play on exact Emerge Exact Shot. And, and the the idea here that we covered was, 00:03:36 yeah, we love new equipment. You go to the National Farm Machinery Show, you go to these places, you go to Commodity Classic, there's a, 00:03:42 you know, millions of dollars of horsepower sitting around and shiny steel. 00:03:46 But maybe this is not the year, it's just the reality. But you can put new technology on existing equipment that saves you a bunch of money and the return on investment. 00:03:57 The big thing, when we were staying at that planner, you and I shot a video. You can get your money back in the first year. 00:04:03 Absolutely. You can because of the savings. Yeah. Uh, you know, if you're a guy that puts on Inferral, which I am, uh, 00:04:08 you're gonna get the money back in, in less than a year. So then we've moved on down the line 00:04:13 and about, there's Inca stuff also, and I know they had sprayer stuff, but since we're sticking with, uh, 00:04:18 the smart spend on fertility, we spent time in the Nature's panel booth. We did a panel there. We spent time in our friend's 00:04:24 Agri Liquid in their booth. And an overriding theme was, um, and, and you've said it, in fact, you even got somebody, one 00:04:32 of our videos from Commodity Classic spurred on one of our followers online to claim that he wasn't gonna listen to our advice. 00:04:39 Because it's easy to say you can cut back on fertility when you've got Iowa soils, but I'm in Kentucky. 00:04:44 Well, the reality is, there's a lot of folks that are overspending on fertility. And the better the technology gets 00:04:50 and the better our knowledge gets, the more it dawns on you, it is time to cut back or, or, or spin smarter. 00:04:58 Yes. And because of that video being on Facebook, uh, I made a new friend from Kentucky, his name is Nick. Nick, uh, really doubted what I was saying at first 00:05:06 because he has Kentucky soil and he assumes that the Iowa soil is much better and much easier to work with. 00:05:12 And, and in some ways it very much is. But at the end of the day, no matter where we live, all of our soil has the ability to get out of balance. 00:05:20 And Nick, you know, we, we corresponded back and forth there on Facebook a little bit. And then I told Nick, why don't you gimme a call 00:05:26 and we could talk about this. Uh, because he talked about his challenges with his dry and things like that. 00:05:32 Nick's base saturation, mu like, like much of mine is base saturation. Potassium is only one to 3%. 00:05:39 And ideally we would, uh, ideally we would like it to be 4%. And I said, well, Nick, I bet where it's only 1%, 00:05:45 those are your tougher yielding environments. And he agreed that it was, um, we then talked about a typical spend on, 00:05:53 on dry potassium would be about 35 to $40 an acre. Uh, is is where he felt that it would come in at and things like that. 00:06:00 We're talking about it. And I said, Nick, that money going into 1%, uh, base saturation K is, um, it's not gonna be readily, readily available. 00:06:11 And I, it isn't like you're wasting the money because it's in the soil, but that soil needs a to be amended to make it available. 00:06:17 Right. And, and in talking to Nick and, and listening to his fertilizer program, his soils are in pretty great shape, 00:06:24 but the base saturation needs some more. Just like a lot of our soils do mine. I'm constantly battling that base saturation. 00:06:29 So I said, what if you didn't put the dry fertility on this year? Or what if you cut it back in half? So, you know, 35, $40. 00:06:37 What if you cut back the dry fertility $18 bought a gallon of potassium acetate from nature's uh, sugar, 00:06:45 K from agro liquid, uh, the full tech K from spray tech, whatever company you wanna work with. 00:06:49 What if you spent, and what if you saved, pulled $18 out of the dry and spent about eight with your fungicide? 00:06:56 'cause he does apply fungicide. What if you spent eight with your fungicide? I bet you'd see a yield gain 00:07:01 because of your base saturation. I'm very confident of that. And you're gonna save $10 an acre. 00:07:06 He, he, uh, Nick, this is where I made a new friend. He thought that that sounded pretty awesome. And he's gonna take a look. 00:07:12 And I actually connected him with Johnny Rell and Brian Brian Adams. 'cause he doesn't live that far away. 00:07:17 And, uh, we'll see what we can do to help him out. So one of the things that we had in one of our panels, that's good work, by the way. 00:07:23 One of the things that's upstream ag is all about helping other farmers farm better. 00:07:26 Uh, and, and obviously keep the doors open for another year. Uh, financially, we talked about this in, 00:07:32 I think it was Agri liquids booth. And I said, you know, everybody obsesses about fertility spend. 00:07:38 And in the scope of things, you've got the land rent, you got the equipment, you got your, your your time, which a lot of farmers don't adequately compensate for that. 00:07:47 And your, your interest costs for God's sakes, if you're using borrowed money at 8%, you've got now interest costs. 00:07:52 And then they obsess over fertility. And I said in some ways, and I said this to our friend Galen, I said, you know, 00:07:59 this reminds me of the person that's got a terrible financial position. They got money just literally, they're hemorrhaging, 00:08:05 hemorrhaging finances, and yet they obsess over the gas price. Well, it's 4 cents cheaper down the road. 00:08:11 I'm like, this is gonna save you a dollar a week. You know, and you're obsessing over this. You're, you're literally dropping 00:08:19 $500 a week unnecessarily over here, and you're worried about a dollar a week savings in gas. That's where I think some people on this 00:08:25 fertility, you can spend smarter. You're probably over applying, but you're also over obsessing over this. 00:08:32 There's maybe some other places. So let's start with the fertility, but then also where can you pick up 00:08:37 easier spend, uh, savings? Well, right, you know, uh, the, the potash there for, for Nick in Kentucky is just one example. 00:08:46 There's many areas where we could cut back and live off the savings account in our soil. Uh, but you know, if, if, if a farmer is uncomfortable 00:08:55 with going with, with liquid fertility, he believes in the dry program. If your base saturation is still outta whack, 00:09:01 let's put some ammonium sulfate on to amend the base saturation, make the gr make the fertility in the soil more available. 00:09:07 Because you, you've put that fertility on year over year over year. And, and when it's not available, it's building up. 00:09:13 So you have a nice savings account, I call it in the soil. Let's spend some money on ammonium sulfate, 00:09:18 which I would tell you is probably quite a bit less expensive. And let's live on that savings account for a year or so 00:09:24 and save the money in an economic time like this. So I think that there are, there are people dropping dollars 00:09:31 to pick up dimes on fertility, but we also know that there's a lot of applied fertility that ends up not doing you any good. 00:09:37 And it seems to me nitrogen and phosphorus are the most over applied. You, your, your famous thing is 00:09:42 that there's really nitrogen's not one of the macronutrients, it's the macro of macronutrients. Um, I think that we're probably seeing, 00:09:50 I saw several companies that come by the classic that their big thing obviously pivot by one of our, uh, you know, sound. 00:09:58 Another one of our companies we work with, they, their whole thing is we can help you reduce nitrogen spend. They've been saying this for a while, 00:10:05 we've known this for a while. I still don't see enough farmers reducing nitrogen spend. And it's, but it's because it's hard to measure 00:10:13 and it's because they don't know. And it's hard to change. What we have done, we have started to work this, we're in, 00:10:19 this will be going into year four or year three very heavily with New age labs out of South Haven, Michigan. 00:10:26 Yep. And it's the SAP test. Yeah. And I talked a lot about this. So you need to take a SAP test 00:10:32 to know where your plants are. You need to take some rapid soil tests to know how much nitrogen's available in your soil and validate it. 00:10:39 How do you change what you don't measure? How do you know, how do you confidently make that change without measuring it? 00:10:45 So another way to have, have a smart spend is let's use the rapid soil test. Let's use the SAP tests from new age labs 00:10:54 and let's validate what we have. Maybe you, maybe you shouldn't cut nitrogen. Maybe it's a bad idea, but you don't know. 00:11:00 And at the end of the day, when you do know, then you can make secure decisions that impact your finances in a positive way. 00:11:10 When you went through all this stuff at Commodity Classic, we, you were on a panel, uh, at Nature's, 00:11:16 and I think that the one you were on was about, um, it was, were you the one about surviving in 25 and given your tips or you on the other one? 00:11:27 I think it was surviving 25. What, what to do. Okay. Because we, we did a couple, then we did another one, uh, in there as well. 00:11:33 So when you put out this idea, and then the recorder that we watched there, what was the, what was the takeaway? 00:11:40 The takeaway for me was what was the sap measure? Measure measure. Let's measure, let's measure. So we know. Yeah. 00:11:46 There's a lot of people saying that you should cut nitrogen. Yeah. There, I will tell you they're probably right. 00:11:51 But how much, and I would also tell you, we have cut nitrogen and we've reallocated those dollars into micronutrients 00:11:58 to balance the nitrogen. Really to say cut nitrogen is an incomplete statement. We wanna balance the nitrogen balance to me is assimilating 00:12:06 or using 95% of the nitrogen. And that's what we use the SAP test for. 'cause I don't wanna spend any more money. 00:12:12 I don't wanna spend one nickel more than I have to. And the SAP test gives me the direction on how to do that. So dig this commodity classic, uh, rightly so, 00:12:21 has some real forward thinking producers. It's, it's, it's, it's not, uh, I mean this is, this is the people in the front 00:12:27 of the tour to front of the class. And what's interesting, even there, we asked for a show of hand in that, uh, panel about measuring, 00:12:34 and people get a little embarrassed and they don't wanna admit there's a bunch of people that are even at the front of the 00:12:39 class that aren't measuring. So yeah, they're, they're, they're doing well. They get yield, but they're probably dropping dollars 00:12:45 unnecessarily because they haven't done the measuring. Uh, and it's interesting. These are not even the laggards. These are the people that are, 00:12:54 that you'd say they're doing a great job and they're still not measuring, uh, for results. There, there's still a lot of producers out there. 00:13:02 I was one of 'em until a few years ago that the, you know, I would call it the horseshoe and hand grenades approach. 00:13:06 Yep. It's close enough, you know, and, and in a, when we have a, a good economic time, it, it probably is. 00:13:14 I mean, I would still say that I, I want to have a very detailed approach now to capture as many dollars as I can. 00:13:20 But in a good economic time, horseshoe and hand grenades will, uh, will still make you a living. You'll still be successful and, and it's easy. 00:13:28 But, uh, what with things like this, we really need to dial in and, and see where we can get to. And that's why I wanna measure and see what I can do. 00:13:36 And the SAP test is the best information, the best test I've come across to be able to do that. Well, The big thing, we covered this by the way, dear listener 00:13:44 or viewer in another episode, we're talking about SAP versus tissue. Tissue is good. 00:13:50 It tells you what was happening in the plant a week ago. And our guys say, 00:13:54 don't make immediate changes based on tissue. Just use it as sort of a, um, accumulation of knowledge. SAP gives you instantaneous, you know, 00:14:04 what's going on in that plant right now. And that's the big advantage of the sap. And I think it was Evans that was on for 00:14:08 that, uh, interview. SAP is telling you what's going on right now, and the SAP will tell you what the plant needs. 00:14:14 So you can make an application off of a SAP test. I would not advise you to make it an application off of a tissue test. Right. 00:14:20 Okay. I want to get the final wrap of, uh, commodity Classic. Before I do, I wanna remind you, 00:14:24 dear listener about Nature's that we were in the panel. As I said, Kelly was in the panel. I know, by the way, on day one, 00:14:28 our panel was packing on the pounds. And I wanted to use Kelly as my example of a body of a, of a, of a Husky guy versus our friend Jack, 00:14:36 who is our intern. Jack, Jack. Mike Jack could still wrestle 1 0 3 if they had the 1 0 3 weight class. 00:14:42 Still, Jack could probably go 1 0 3. Um, and I, if you take the cowboy boots off, he loses half of his body weight. 00:14:50 I'm not kidding. You should meet this kid. Anyway, we did packing on the pounds, uh, for your crops. Then we did survive and thrive in 25. 00:14:56 Kelly was on the Survive and Thrive in 25. So Nature's is, uh, powered by Bio K. That is their technology. 00:15:01 We learned all about that while we're there. And basically it's talking about potassium acetate and how to make it available for your plant. 00:15:07 And then the other point of is what potassium does for all the other nutrients, your micros in particular. So you really check this out. 00:15:13 You can get, uh, you can target critical times during the season, uh, via precision placement techniques to mitigate plant stress, enhanced 00:15:20 crop yield, and boost your farms. ROI go to natures.com. That's N-A-C-H-U-R-S natures.com. Um, I, I think that we get a little, uh, 00:15:30 people in ag get a little bit like apprehensive when there's a, obviously it's a cyclical business, 00:15:36 but we saw a lot of options. Everybody is trying to sell something, right? That's the hints of, of a trade show. 00:15:42 But I saw a lot of options that told you how to reduce spend. And I think the biological space, some of these companies 00:15:48 that we talk about on how you can reduce, especially, uh, you know, you don't have to spend on a brand new planter. 00:15:55 You can retrofit. You don't have to go out and do more fertility just because you want a bigger yield. 00:16:00 You can use these other products to offset some of that. And I think there's a, I think there's more acceptance in 00:16:05 the marketplace than there has been. I do think there's more acceptance in the marketplace, and that's what happens when you have sub $5 00:16:12 corn. Uh, another thing People get, people get more open-minded when, when it uh, becomes this way. They they 00:16:19 Do. And they, they do because it gets tougher and they've got to pay attention. And I would say, you know, how about this? 00:16:25 Here's my ultimate thing, my closing statement. When we have six and $7 corn, you should not stop conducting trials on your farm, right? 00:16:33 Because at, at that time, in the six and $7 corn, when things are easy, conduct the trials and see what really works. 00:16:40 So then you can really dial in when there's sub $5 corn, because we all know it. 00:16:45 It's a cyclical business. We all know it's coming back. And now we, um, now as sub $5 corn, you've got the trials under your belt, you know what works, 00:16:53 and you know what to dial in. And you don't have to run scared. You don't have to be nervous about it. 00:16:57 You don't have to ever feel like you're in a desperate position because you're really dialed in because you used the good economic times to prepare 00:17:03 for the tough economic times. Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's a real thing. Like all of a sudden being poised 00:17:10 and calm, uh, when, when the chips are down. If you've been there before and you also said, yeah, I, I built my, 00:17:16 I built my foundation when things were up. And that's really what you're talking about. That's absolutely correct. It's 00:17:22 Almost like a children's fable. I mean, something about building a house outta straw, twigs, brick, I don't know. Something like this. Yep. 00:17:27 Yes. That, that's a good analogy. Mixing metaphors and fables and all that. His name's Kelly Garrett. He's full of metaphors, 00:17:33 fables, all that kind of thing. And, uh, if you wanna learn more, go to Extreme ag.farm, a literal library of information you 00:17:40 can use to help you farm better. Thousands at this point of videos that these guys have shot at their farming operation. 00:17:45 Hundreds of videos that right here and audios of cutting the curve. And also our new show, 00:17:50 the Grainery, you really need to check it out. It's guys like Kelly who's gonna be there next week, where we sit at my table at my on-Farm Tavern 00:17:56 and we discuss issues, the personal and the professional side of farming and the real life. You are invited, figuratively, 00:18:01 to pull up a chair and join us at the Grainery. Check out all that stuff, either@extremeag.farm, or go to our YouTube channel. 00:18:07 That's right. It doesn't cost you nothing. Go to YouTube and hit subscribe. We'd love you to be there. His name's Kelly Garrett. Thanks for being here, my friend. 00:18:14 He didn't even say thank you. I said thank you. He said, you're welcome. Anyway, his name's Kelly Garrett. My name's Damien Mason. Thanks 00:18:19 for being here till next time at Extreme Ag Cutting the curve. That's A wrap for this episode 00:18:23 of Extreme Ag Cutting the Curve Podcast. Make sure to check out extreme ag.com for more great content. 00:18:30 Cutting. The curve is powered by Nature's Bio. Kay. Check out nature's dot com to learn more about how Bio Kay can improve your farm's. 495 00:18:37.685 --> 00:18:38.125