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Welcome to Extreme ags Cutting the Curve podcast, where real farmers share real insights and real results to help you improve your farming operation.
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And now here's your host, Damien Mason. What your water is, your soil becomes, it's one of the favorite statements from Jared Cook
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with calibrated agronomy. We teased this in a shortcut. Now we're gonna go more in depth. So you got all the time in the world to explain this.
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I, you first said this on one of our calls, I've heard you say it at, I think, uh, an event that I was at with you when you were doing a presentation.
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I like it because the first thing is, what the hell is he talking about? What your water is, your soil becomes. What does that mean?
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What it means, Damia is water, irrigation water spray water, whatever water source farmers use.
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It's not just hydrogen and oxygen. It's not just H2O. It's got inherent baggage. And that can be baggage from mineral, mineral, uh, profiles.
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Yep. Biological profiles. There's, there's a lot of baggage in there. And, and most of the industry overlooks what's in the water.
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It took me getting involved with extreme ag to even think about this. That everything that you go in the sprayer tank,
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unless you were using distilled water, it's gonna have something in there that could actually then it could clog up your nozzles.
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It could interact with the chemistry, it could kill the biological. Remember we had somebody do that? They used a municipal
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water source that had chlorine. Well, it killed the biologicals. And then I started thinking, well, yeah.
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Growing up, that's why we have a water softener our water in Indiana. Very irony. Uh, my glasses, I drink hard water with the,
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the nons softened are like reddish colored Right? Because of the iron. So I get all that, but then I would think it only matters if I'm pumping it.
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It only matters if I'm pumping it outta my well to irrigate or if I'm pumping my well to put in the sprayer tank.
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This can't apply to rain water because it doesn't have all those minerals. Right, Right. You know, it's
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interesting. Uh, a good customer of ours, uh, John Abrahamson outta Nebraska, he, he actually collected rainwater, um, from two,
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two different rains, rain events. He captured it in a bucket and then sent that off to be analyzed.
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And I'll tell you what, Damian, it was fascinating to see what the mineral composition was within, within that water.
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Even the stuff that comes outta the sky has mineralization. Yeah. You know what's, what was interesting about it is
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the pH was very favorable. It came in about a six eight pH, but it contained calcium. It had nitrogen, it had a tiny jag of phosphorus.
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It had a whole pile of other minerals, you know, with magnesium, potassium. It, um, it's left me a little bit perplexed.
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I'm like, where the heck is that coming from? Yeah. Well, um, I'm old enough to remember when there was this big movement about acid
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rain, acid rain was gonna kill us all. Acid rain was, there was even like a one of those CBS news or something stories that all the monuments, all the famous,
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uh, stone sculptures in, uh, Europe were being degraded because the acid in the rain content was degraded in the way.
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And they were gonna be nothing more than, uh, misshapen the hunks of stone. Uh, in another few years.
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It was very much an alarmist story, as you might imagine. But there was acid in the rain. That is an element.
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And it was sulfur. Am I right? Absolutely. Sulfur. And I think there's a little component of nitric, nitric nitric acid Okay.
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Was some of the component as well. And So we've kind of corrected that because we took care of a bunch of the smoke stacks
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and cleaned that industrialization up, at least in the United States. So now there's not sulfur coming outta the sky,
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which means we don't get free sulfur for our crops. Right. It's true. It's a true statement.
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You know, from my perspective, you know what your water is, your soil becomes hinges more towards the irrigator.
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You know, the farmer that's irrigating. 'cause that's where, you know, in a given year, you're gonna put on, let's just say five to 8 million pounds
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of water per acre. And so very characteristically what that water is. You're, so, it becomes, because
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of the volume that's being applied, It's a real neat thing right there. Obviously most people can get their hands around an inch,
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uh, or even they've heard the term acre foot. So just let's do a kind of a fun thing right there, because that, that is so illustrative of the elements.
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Yep. If I'm irrigating and I don't know what, maybe I put on eight to 10 inches of irrigated depending on where I am to maybe, okay.
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So, so let's just call it, you know, let's call a foot, which, you know, acre foot. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, the last I looked,
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I think an acre foot is like 240,000 gallons. Is that the right number? 312,000 gallons. 312,000 Gallons
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In an AC foot. I might, I might be off by a thousand here or there, but it's real close to 312,000.
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Okay. Because an acre, an acre inch is 27,000 gallons. Okay. So let's just do a fun thing. An acre inch at 27,000
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gallons, is that what you just told me? Yep. Get my calculator out. 27,000 gallons times eight pounds,
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basically. Right? Yeah. 8.3, 8.3 pounds. 224,000 to pounds Per inch. Per
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inch. Yeah. And so now you say, because when people are like, oh, how much mineral can there be in there?
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Well, there's 224,000 to pounds in a acre. Inch of wa an inch of water over one acre. Hell, if it's just a trace amount,
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you're still talking about, uh, it could be at 1%. It's more than 2000 pounds, right? Oh yeah. It's a half a percent. It's 200 pounds. Yeah.
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And now you say, wait a minute, if I was gonna actually fertilize with that, if I was gonna apply that amount of calcium sulfur,
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or whatever that thing is, it's right in line with that. It's right in line. You know, we, we launched a video,
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calibrate agronomy, launched a video where I, I distinctly said, look at your water as a fertilizer. And we had, I can't, I can't tell you the number
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of comments, questions, and, and inquiry we had on that statement. What does that mean? And so we finally had, you know,
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in discussions with a lot of different farmers, had to just lay it out, this simple math, you know, so what's an acre, acre foot?
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312,000 gallons. What's that math, Damien, if we times that? 312 by 8.3.
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8.3 or, yeah. 2.4 million, 2.5, 2.4 million. Okay. So 2.4 million pounds of water hitting your soil. Everything I look at has is based on acre foot. Okay.
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So it's pounds of calcium, pounds of magnesium, pounds of sodium per acre foot, and depending on where your water originates Yep.
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You can have upwards 150 to 200 pounds of calcium per acre foot. You can have 30 to 40 pounds of nitrate nitrogen.
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Some parts of Nebraska, they got 70, 80, 90 pounds of sulfur. Yeah. Per acre foot.
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What you, so all of a sudden you're getting, you're getting inputs that you didn't pay for necessarily. You pumped 'em outta the ground if you're doing irrigation.
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Um, but the other part of that is you're getting outta balance. And that's where we talk a lot about,
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and Kelly Garrett talks a lot about, I think you've helped him with that balance, balance, balance, calcium and magnesium ratio, whatever.
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The biggest thing that comes outta groundwater, I'm guessing is calcium and Calcium mag sodium,
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but probably more so than, more than anything is bicarbonate. Ah, Yeah. Hco. O three. Okay.
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That is our, that's probably the most, most antagonistic element on planet earth. So what's it do?
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What's it do when, if I'm using irrigated water and it's got a bunch of bicarbonate, what's it do? So bicarbonate is a negative charge
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by chemical arrangement. Therefore it has the capacity to tie up or bind calcium mag potassium, sodium ammonium, even.
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It'll, it'll tie up pound for pound your cation. And so her pounded bicarbonate comes into the system. It has the potential to tie up a pound of your
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precious cation nutrition. And so a lot of times, a lot of times, Damien, we'll apply in an acre foot of water, we'll apply
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between three and 400 pounds of bicarbonate. Mm-hmm. So let's talk about irrigated water. So I wanna do is three different things I wanna do irrigated
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water, um, and then I wanna do water that I put in my sprayer, and then I wanna do even rain water to make sure that
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what my water is, my soil becomes what I want then is my soil to become better. Right. So I ideally, if I'm starting with water,
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that is gonna change that, how do I do it? So on irrigation, I assume that you tell your clients. So you go out there and say, Hey,
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I'm gonna help you improve your land and produce crops. You're using irrigation water. And first off, you test it. Yep. And I'm guessing also, so you got one
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of your large operators that has a bunch of different wells. You don't just test one, you probably gotta test them
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All. Test them all. Absolutely. You gotta know, you gotta know the source. Mm-hmm. So if, if we got a lot of,
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Even in Idaho, say you're operating in Idaho. Yep. We have a lot of guys, they'll, they'll pump deep well water
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and they'll also apply surface water. Those are two wildly different chemical arrangements. And so we've gotta know,
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we gotta know what's, what's the origin. And so I like to test the water that's coming right out of the irrigation system.
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That's the most accurate Yep. Measure of what you're getting. Yep. So then you test it and you say, here's what you got,
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and now what do I do? Because then you say, how much are you putting on then? Because obviously here's what you, here's what, uh,
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two ounces of your water has in it, but two ounces ain't. Well, this field's gonna get four
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inches this year of irrigation. That field over there is gonna get eight inches. So that changes everything. Also, the
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Calculus changes. Yeah. So you gotta know the rate and frequency of application rate, rate applied inches applied,
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and how frequently that's gonna happen for us here in the west, we, we irrigate weekly. You know, if we, if we don't, if we don't irrigate,
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boy we are jackrabbits and Water packs. There's no potatoes. There's no potatoes, there's no potatoes. If you don't irrigate
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Potatoes, nothing. So, well, Alright, so then, then are there amendments that need to be made so that you're making sure that the soil
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that's becoming, I'm sorry, your soil, that becomes what your water is Yeah. Is what you want. Yeah. So then from once we understand what we have now,
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now we have the framework to be able to decide what do we want. And then from that point forward, we can say, well,
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I need to add phosphorus. I'm, maybe I need to add more calcium. Maybe I need to acidify that water.
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From there we can make those decisions to help create a new water. That's the whole idea. We want to create a new water. Create
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A new water. Yeah, buddy. Alright. That's a new tagline there, dam. Yeah, I like it. You're full tagline.
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So, alright. What about then for my sprayer, that's a little easier because it's a smaller amount,
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but I'm also putting in very expensive inputs in my sprayer, the stuff that I'm going out to make my crop.
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So I think the, the quantity gets lesser, but the stakes, the table you just went to Las Vegas. So for the national finals rodeo,
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so I'll say the table stakes go up in the sprayer because while it's only 1200 gallons, every ounce is a big deal because it's got a bunch
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of expensive inputs in it, and I'm getting drops, literally little teeny drops on my plants that, um, make my crop.
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Yeah. You can have drops. I, I think as far as sprayer water's concerned, it's probably the mineral nutrition baggage applied
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to your crop is minuscule. Where, where I think there's more emphasis is what those minerals actually do
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to the chemistries you're putting into the water. You know, like glyphosate for example, you take roundup, you apply it to a high calcium, high bicarbonate water,
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large percentage of that glyphosate is going to precipitate with the calcium in the water.
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If there's no adjuvant or amendment applied, that's, that's your biggest threat. The other, the other big threat is you take a 10 gallon per
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acre rate of water, what's the biological composition of your water? Mm. We, we've done a lot
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of tests here the last year across the United States for calibrated agronomy. Looking at what the biological profile of the water sources
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that we use for sprayers. It's wild. Mm-hmm. You go from bacterial dominant to fun, fungal dominant. I mean, there's a myriad of different, um,
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biological constituents within the water. And so to me that water is a, it's about you're spraying on an inoculant.
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Yeah. You have biological inoculant going out there that I don't think anybody's accounting for. Probably the easiest thing to know there is,
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is first off test the water that comes outta your source that you put to your sprayer.
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But then I know that there's a spray tech and some other companies make a water treatment that mm-hmm. Uh, that, that, do you think
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that you should always use some kind of water treatment probably for your sprayer? Absolutely. Yeah. I, I think the, the, the adjuvant,
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the amendments you apply with the chemistry is equally is equal in, in importance. If you're not, if you're not at an ammonium sulfate,
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you know, a MS boy, that is a huge mistake. And that that's room for improvement for everybody. If you're
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Not, gimme a story of, in your experience of when you came up with this, what your water is, your soil becomes where you went out and you saw a nightmare
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or you saw this amazing situation and said, how did it get this way? And you traced it back to the water.
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So when this aha moment came to you, you got some stories for that? Yeah. I got a story for you. I like stories.
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I know you like hearing my stories. I like Hearing your stories. So I'll get, this was a cool one.
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I had the guy customer that was spraying sugar beets and he spraying roundup, you know, typical roundup ready sugar beets.
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Anyway, he had sprayed 500 acres, uh, in a day. Well, 250 of those acres was sprayed from a deep well water source.
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Second, he shifted over to the other side of the farm. Well, unbeknownst to us, he, he, he switched water source. Well, all of a sudden we started to see that the weeds,
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the weeds weren't dying mm-hmm. Proportionally to what he sprayed the first 250 acres versus the second 250.
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They didn't die the same. We're like, what in the world's going on? Well, finally we connected the dots.
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He had switched water sources, everything that he sprayed with surface water, which is, you know,
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very favorable pH lower bicarbonate load, lower mineral load. Yep. Wait, the adjuvant package, we ran money. The
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Deep, the deep water source. Was it a pH issue? Oh yeah. As soon as we switched to the deep, well boy, the pH jumped up.
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I mean, it was almost a nine pH water. It had 350, uh, well 450 parts per in bicarbonate in it. The calcium load was out the yin yang
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and we didn't have enough adjuvant to buffer the antagonism. Mm-hmm. Therefore we got a poor, poor
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Kill. So the antagonistic nature of what was in that water degraded the efficacy for certain of the glyphosate
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and then probably what even absorption of the other stuff maybe, uh, I think all the above. Yeah.
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Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. And that, you know, that's a concern. 'cause we got a, we got a sub sub lethal dose applied, you know, that's one step towards weed resistance in
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the grand scheme of it all. And so it, it was a hard lesson learned. And what we, I I think there's a lot we can do
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to prevent weed resistance just by knowing what the water source is that we're spraying. So the person that is, uh, not an irrigator,
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let's say they're my neighbor's in Indiana where we don't irrigate, they still need to pay attention to this, uh, tagline that you have, what your water is,
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your soil comes because on the sprayer, and they're gonna say, but that's just for the does does does.
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There's, there's so little water that I'm putting out via a sprayer. It can't change the soil, but it can definitely change the
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efficacy of what's in the sprayer. It doesn't probably change the soil or does it Right. Uh, I don't know that it changes the soil mineral.
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The soil mineralogy. Let's leave it there. But what it does and can change is the biological pers uh,
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port portfolio of the soil. 'cause every water has a bio biological baggage. That's what can change the soil performance.
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Every soil has a water biological baggage. Is that what you just said? Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so that can change even just by the little bit
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of mineral that isn't going through my sprayer. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Last thought.
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What if I don't irrigate, but you talked about catching rainwater. Um, is it, is it something
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that you think in the future we're gonna actually do samples of our rainwater and say,
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'cause it could vary where I am could vary. You go a state away, it could be different, it could be different stuff in the rainwater.
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Is that something you see forward thinking operators doing, or agronomy types like you doing in the future?
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I think it's wor it's a wor it's worthwhile knowing what's in that rainwater for sure.
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Yeah. I do. I I don't want to be that tin hat wearing kind of guy right now, but,
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but I, I do, I think, I think, you know, in today's modern farming, there's just so many variables we manage that we have to know.
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I think we gotta know the details of every single variable that goes into producing a crop.
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Yeah. I think that's probably accurate. All right. Last thought on your, I mean, one of your favorite statements.
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Water. Your water is, or So it becomes My la my favorite statement. No, Like, what's your last thought on this? My last
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Thought At the website right now? Yes. Well, I think everybody needs to adopt the philosophy and start taking a really hard close look
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at what their water is. I think that's Probably true. It's the largest input on any irrigated farm.
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It's the largest input by volume, no questions asked. Yeah. And then, and then on non irrigated acres, it's the one variable we always talk about.
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Did you get the rain? Did you catch the rain? All that stuff. What's in the rain? I think it's a, it's a question worth asking.
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Yeah. What's in the rain and what, what, what biology's in the water that you're spraying out there
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that you're not accounting for? If you wanna learn more about any of this, you can find Jared Cook.
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A company's called Calibrated Agronomy. I just pulled up. The website is calibrate your agronomy.com.
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Calibrate your agronomy.com. If you like this episode, please share it with somebody. It's a great statement. He's full of these.
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He's, he's the Witt, he is the wittiest agronomist from the mountain west. You'll ever talk to his name's Jerry Cook.
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You can follow him, can look him up. Go to that website. In the meantime, share this
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with somebody that can benefit from it. And, uh, as you know, go to Extreme Ag Farm for hundreds of episodes just like this to help you farm better.
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And then also our shortcut series. And then don't forget the Grainery show. And if you are a member, you can come
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You go to Cal, uh, to Commodity Classic for free. Check it all out at Extreme Ag Farm. Till next time, he's Jared. I'm Damien.
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And this is Extreme Ag Cutting the curve. That's a wrap for this episode of Cutting the Curve. Make sure to check out Extreme ag.farm
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