00:00:00 Pretty, but is it profitable? You know, you go to these field days, you look at these farms and you see beautiful crops 00:00:06 and you're like, oh man, that's amazing. It's on to cover all the ag magazines. People like to brag about it, but it's pretty profitable. 00:00:13 The question you might be asking, especially in an era of low commodity prices, are you looking for pretty, are you looking for profitable? 00:00:19 That's what we're talking about at the table in the greenery with you and my friends from extreme ag on a 00:00:25 farm. The work's never really Done. We're calling the day anyway because my friends from extreme ag are coming over. 00:00:31 You ready for a conversation with some real farmers about real issues? And the best part, you are invited, 00:00:37 support yourself a drink, grab a snack. Most importantly, pull up a chair. Welcome to the greenery. Hey guys. 00:00:53 Alright Guys, You just heard the topic. And for the viewers, I think it's really important to know we don't share any of this 00:00:59 until I announce it to the camera. And that way it's all off the cuff for you guys. And I wanted to share this in particular with not just Matt 00:01:06 and Chad, but my friend Tommy Roach from Nature's, because we do these field days and we've all been to 'em. Anybody that's worked in ag, you've been to the field days, 00:01:14 and what do all the seed companies all come do? They wanna show you something that's just amazing. It's beautiful. Oh my God, this is a race horse. 00:01:21 Oh, there's no crop that's ever been as good as this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then sometimes you gotta ask yourself, 00:01:26 all right, that's impressive. That's pretty, is it profitable? And especially when we're heading into $4 corn and $9 00:01:32 and something soybeans, most farmers don't want the fields to look like crap. Do you have, do you have a 00:01:38 wherewithal? Let your fields look like Crap. I mean, I don't, but I just don't drive by though. You know? And, and that's like Dad says, you know, when we go 00:01:46 to Commodity Classic, he said, I walked from one aisle, one end of the aisle to the other end of the aisle, and I made 500 bushel time. 00:01:52 I got to the end, you know? Yeah. Because every, every, every Vendor, everybody got another three bushel, 00:01:56 Every vendor booth. If you'll just use our product, we got you for three to five more bushel. And you 00:01:59 Lost 200 of that as you were walking. Yeah. While I was walking, I lost 200. So, dig this. It's not a knock. 00:02:06 You guys are good at what you do. That's why people keep up with what we do. You did a field day once, or no, a trial once, 00:02:13 and you said, everybody told me to stick it back behind the alligator pond where nobody's gonna see it, but you stuck it next to the high school on the main road. 00:02:20 Am I right? Yeah. So if it had looked like s**t, and it would've been an absolute embarrassment, you'd have really had a hard time with you, 00:02:26 but it worked out in the future. Or you gonna make sure something that could end up looking ugly, doesn't have any exposure? 00:02:33 Well, no. That was the point of putting it where I put it. And it was actually when I did the February beats, you know, 00:02:39 I put them on the busiest highway I had, because if I sink or swim, people need to know I'm sinking or swimming. 00:02:46 So, you know, as far as pretty now my, I try to keep my farm in really nice shape. Yeah. Again, share rent landowner comes by there. 00:02:53 Hey, he's, his farm looks good. His farm's all growed up. Pigweeds are so bad, ma, tail rye that we have to, we have 00:03:00 to address that, um, to a certain degree, probably even cash rent also, you know? Yeah. But as far as something that I'm gonna fail on, 00:03:08 I just, I, I'm not going keep it a secret anyway. And, and you know, there used to be a point in our careers where we would've put that on a bat. Oh yes. 00:03:14 We Would've put that. But we fell so much now that Yeah. We just said let's just like you said, sink or swim. 00:03:19 Like we'll just see what happens. Yeah. Well, with extreme ag, we're kind of in the business of demonstrating trials. 00:03:24 And so yeah. A trial goes awry. We're showing to people and he makes a good point. Tommy might get nervous, you know, you go, 00:03:32 You, you go, Oliver, I wanna talk about Es Before I do that, I wanna address what Matt said with you. You work all over the country. 00:03:37 I've worked around all the country. We see all these ag people. I had it happen right here at my field 10, 15 years ago 00:03:43 that things didn't look good out there. Probably made money for the operator. I got my cash rent, I had three people. 00:03:49 If I had a field look like that, I'd be changing tenants. To your point. Yeah. 00:03:53 And I care. This check clears and then nothing's being degraded. A few weeds out here, they'll get handled another week. 00:04:00 What's the big deal? You see this? I see it all the time. And so how we manage crops, especially we, we'll say soybeans, we've kind of, 00:04:12 at least I have, I used to hate soybeans, but now it's, oh man, I'm sorry. I know I'm sitting, you sitting next 00:04:19 to the soybean king here. But now it's, it's a challenge. And, and I guess maybe I like challenges 00:04:27 and used to we didn't, we wanted, uh, nice. Pretty filled. But now you don't get paid for stems and leaves. Mm-hmm. 00:04:37 That you know how to own that. The elevator. Now what? That's why I try to burn mine off. And literally we wanna stress, we've gotten to where Yeah. 00:04:46 Our knowledge of how to manage beans. I mean, we're still learning, but we wanna stress 'em. We wanna make 'em kinda look ugly. 00:04:55 So, so dig this again, it's not field days. Even though that all ag companies once wanted to drag farmers out there on the hay wagon. 00:05:02 And so show 'em some meeting. It was two years ago at Kelly's, maybe it was last year at Kelly's. 00:05:07 I looked and I said, this is a field of soybeans right by your shop, right where everybody comes. I said, this is one ugly ass field of soybeans. 00:05:14 Why don't you throw some water to this? You've got this inferior or subsurface drip irrigation. And he said, I don't want these to water right now. 00:05:21 I never even thought of that. You didn't want a bunch of vegetative growth. Yeah. You've gotta have a certain amount of backbone 00:05:26 to let your field look like crap. Well, I don't know if it's really looking Like crap. It's 00:05:31 just the, the nature of the beast. It's understanding the plant, you know, and with that soybean, you know, 00:05:35 even in our double crop beans, we say the same thing. We just wanna keep 'em alive until they start blooming it. Yeah. You know, head into bloom 00:05:41 and then you're gonna start pouring water to it. And actually they drink more water than corn to us, you know? Yeah. 00:05:46 They actually do. So, you know, but it's just a timing deal because they will get away from you. 00:05:50 Like you can over water a bean in a hurry. Well, with some of these, and I don't, we just talking about bean 00:05:54 'cause that's what Tommy brought up, you know? Yeah. It Just, you know, some of these cover crop programs, sustainability programs, you know, you, you know, 00:06:00 everybody used to be conventional tillage. And, and we still are to a certain degree, a percentage of ours. 00:06:05 I think you are too. But you know, farming ugly sometimes is more profitable. Now when you, when you say ugly, you know, 00:06:13 there may be a cover crop out there that's not quite dead. Yep. Or your metals may be stopped up with a, you know, 00:06:18 stove from the previous crop or whatever. But you gotta have that plant pretty, now when I say pretty, pretty in the eyes of the beholder, a big bushy nice bean 00:06:27 before it's R one is not pretty to me, it's pretty to the guy going down the road. Mm-hmm. But just like Mr. 00:06:32 Tommy said, that's not what we're looking for. We don't look scuffed up beat up like it's been to a bar fight. 00:06:38 And then when it starts, its reproductive stage. Now corn, you can't do that with, and cotton, you can't either. 00:06:42 You got ugly corn, it's young. You're gonna have ugly corn when it's older. Yeah. It's an interesting point there that, uh, about pretty, 00:06:49 you know, we talked about how in different episode about land, you got some old farmer and they, uh, and the, and and he's dead. 00:06:58 And the widow has 160 acres and they rent it. If it doesn't look like it did when Elmer farmed it, if it's not sprayed and tilled 00:07:07 and tilled, she expects it to be fall plowed. You know, we don't use mold boards anymore because that's what Elmer did. 00:07:14 And a lot of that's bad for the soil and not profitable. But these people do it to keep, uh, Edna happy 00:07:20 because Edna wants to farm to look like what Elmer. And seriously, I see this, You sna been there, done that. Yeah. 00:07:26 And you want kind of tell Edna, Hey listen, Edna, we're doing things a lot different than when Elmer was still alive. 00:07:30 I don't look real pretty, but you know what? I'm making money. It's better for your ground. Well, you know, the thing is, is, you know, we we're kind 00:07:36 of talking about, now we're, we're talking about a landlord issue. But you have to be upfront with these landlords. 00:07:41 You know, you, you can't be on the backside of something like that. You know, you, you'd come to and say, Hey, you know, 00:07:45 we gonna farm a little different than what we used to. You know, let me, let me show you what we're doing. Lemme tell you why we're doing it. 00:07:50 And a lot of times they're real receptive to that. But they kind of gotta know how the ga how the plan's going. You know, they gotta know there's a 00:07:55 plan in place. How about that? They're gonna be that guy that came by and told you, you need to change Tim. Yeah. Right. 00:08:00 They go that at least You're not gonna leave kosher weeds and pigweeds out there. This is just farming difference. 00:08:04 It's not gonna let it go to crap and grow. That's right. That's right. We, we'd seed, 00:08:09 Well we used to get on a perfect seabed. So we're raised seabeds. So he would be absolutely tabletop square. 00:08:17 Yep. We might have to do it three times. Yeah. Today we run through there once, run a roller across it. We've got planters that will take the ground. 00:08:24 Butter won't bounce as bad and it don't look as good. You remember what we was talking about earlier? Mm-hmm. Oh, he wants it to be tabletop 00:08:35 and then he plants in a no-till situation where everything's, we Talked, you see what you missed 00:08:39 before Tom, when we were here with the boys, when Temple Temple's an agitant, basically, you know, you got surfactants and you got those, he's an adjective. 00:08:47 He's an A. You add him to the tank mix and it just agitates. Everybody foams 00:08:51 Up and bubbles Up. Oh. He had him foaming and bubbling and then he was com he was getting in competitive stuff with Chad. 00:08:56 Luckily I was the voice of reason and calm, which I always am. And I got everything brought down. 00:09:02 So in the, you Didn't hear the Billy goat story In terms of fertility, in terms of fertilizer, that would be called an exothermic reaction. 00:09:09 Gives off heat. Yeah. Temple A lot of heat. Yes. Temple Exothermic. Thermic. He's an ex, I told you, 00:09:15 this guy's an agronomic expert here. Tommy Roach from Nature's. Anyway, I'm thinking a year like this, some farm people, 00:09:23 farmers, producers, are going to have to swallow some pride and have that conversation with Edna, the landlord 00:09:30 and say, listen, I'm up against the screws here on money. Um, there's gonna be one less pass made this year 00:09:37 because of financials. There's going to be a little bit uglier farming or I'm not gonna be solvent 00:09:43 and I don't, they'll pay you rent, but will they do it? Well, I mean the key to that again, is to have that, have that conversation up front. 00:09:50 And then, you know, also, I mean, there's gonna be things happening like, like now, like on our farm, you know, me 00:09:55 and Tommy's been, we've been, I ain't gonna say, oh, I've been testing for this. I knew this was coming. But we're always testing. 00:10:01 I mean, some of the things we're doing with dry fertilizer versus liquid fertilizer versus infer fertility versus banded stuff. 00:10:08 I mean, there's a lot of that stuff that needs to go on this year. I mean, 'cause we're gonna start cutting $1 and $2 00:10:14 and $3, you know, we ain't looking to cut $50. We're looking to cut ones and twos and threes on every pass. Ain't we met? That's 00:10:20 Right. And then Obviously one, $1 adds up and that's, yeah. I mean, I've always said, you know, if you can make $1 on 00:10:25 a million acres, you can make $1, you know, $1, you can make a million dollars. So talking about these upfront, um, communications. 00:10:34 So Landlord Edna is expecting come September, October seeing dry fertilizer rig running and sling and dry fertilizer. 00:10:43 Yeah. Well that's what Elmer did in 1980. Yeah. You Better have that conversation. You better have that conversation. Maybe we 00:10:49 don't need to be doing that. And you know, and, and now's a good time also to take, you know, take soil samples over there, let 'em see 00:10:55 that we're pulling soil samples. We know what's going on. This is how we're 00:10:58 handling, this is how we're gonna address it. And they'll appreciate you for it. And by the way, we don't know 00:11:01 when the viewers watching this. When you say, now you're meeting, it's about October. It's how Yeah. 00:11:05 Yeah. After harvest, after harvest, after harvest is the time. You know, when we're gonna pour soil samples 00:11:10 or whatever and just kind of know. But, but those conversations need to be had because we all gotta stay in business. 00:11:15 Have you gotten better about farming ugly meaning you, you, you, your prideful side versus your profit side, did you get better at, 00:11:25 at letting the prophet side win over the prideful side? Yeah, I think, I think I have. 00:11:29 I mean, we've learned that it don't have to be perfect all the time unless It's a field Day. Unless 00:11:34 it's a field day. Yeah. Because you can have a lot of people come and look. But no, in all seriousness, you know, we, 00:11:39 we've started letting a few winter weeds say we don't kill 'em on the first pass. You know, we let 'em stay there 'cause they're gonna die 00:11:45 before, you know, they're gonna die in the spring anyway. Mm-hmm. You know, and there's 00:11:49 some starting to get resistant. We've got Ana and sometimes we don't get all of our henbit and it looks ugly out there, but it's not hurting yield. 00:11:56 I've gotten to the point where if it's not hurting my yield and my landowner's okay with it, yeah. 00:12:00 Then, then I'm gonna go that route And, you know, let's, let's, let's talk about that for a minute. 00:12:04 You know, I mean, you look at, you look at uh, Ana and you look at Henbit that are down there in the south and where Matt's at. 00:12:12 I mean those in us essence, they're, they're not labeled as a cover crop, but Matt's trying to get 'em labeled 00:12:18 as a Oh they are now they're labeled as No, they kind of are. They are. That's right. For sure. 00:12:21 They're, they, they should be labeled as a cover crop because they're holding the ground together. You know, you can go out there and clean that ground up 00:12:26 and it's cleans this tabletop and we get that four or five inch rain. Yeah. And all our dirt's washing down the ditches. 00:12:33 You know, so I mean it's, it's it's, but but again, all these conversations need to be had up front. That's 00:12:38 Right. You know, you bring up, we were talking about the landlords and our hypothetical Edna example 00:12:43 and we're talking about the field days. 'cause all the companies want you to just have this thing look like the, you know, garden of Eden at a field day. 00:12:50 But there's the other part of you talking about sometimes where we need to go for conservation isn't always pretty. 00:12:56 Again, it's not fault tillage and it's not multiple cultivations and all that for conservation. 00:13:02 Sometimes conservation doesn't look pretty compared to what Edna's ideal of pretty is. You know, it's got covered crops out there. 00:13:08 It's got some of that. I think the conservation thing is going to force the hand of acceptance of ugly. Am I right? 00:13:16 I mean, I don't know. I just kind of think that it's, again, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Mm-hmm. For sure. You know, when you, 00:13:22 when all your soul's still there, your soul health is good, Your biology's Bad. Your 00:13:27 biology's good. That's pretty, Where do you think things go? Are we gonna get to where we look back 00:13:32 and say, man, remember we used to think this, you know, fall plow everything and this and this and this and this. Now we accept the fact that profit versus pretty 00:13:41 Well, there's no doubt that, and this is regardless of politics, who wins presidential election conservation 00:13:50 and sustainability I think is here to stay. So we have to figure out how to, how to deal with it. And we're still learning on cover crops. 00:14:01 You know, what species do you, you know how when we kill it, we plant it green, we're still, still 00:14:06 Not, I think cover crops is like the is is just like the closing wheel on the planter. 00:14:11 Right. I mean it, it fits everybody different. I was gonna say, it's not a one size fits all deal at all. Take a fur irrigated like me versus a pivot irrigated like 00:14:19 him, he can do things I can't do. Mm-hmm. And same thing with insects. If I plant into a green cover crop, 00:14:25 I might not see my crop 'cause the insects eat up. 'cause they're living in the green cover crop. And then you get to where I'm at and you have to what? 00:14:33 Everything. 'cause we don't get any rain. Right. Cover crop. Uh, you, if you get a, we'll say a August rain, 00:14:39 which we didn't this year. Your cover crop is a wheat crop that might get planted on half a half a pivot 00:14:47 because we're, we're stripping cotton right now, and there's, there's no time to get a cover crop back in on those acres. 00:14:53 Acres. Which is why we get all these sands farmed. What about the, the person that is trying to get over the hump this year? 00:15:01 Again, we're recording this in the fall of 24. We're going to be, I've never seen, uh, a one year downturn in ag, it's gonna be more than one year. 00:15:08 Right. It's just they always are. They're 3, 5, 7. Let's hope that it ain't, but it hadn't yet. How about that? We, we've never historically haven't had that. 00:15:15 So the person that who needs to look at profitability, I think this is the year to really start thinking pretty versus profitable. 00:15:22 One, can you, can you shave one extra pass and take those dollars off? I mean that's where I, I would think the person 00:15:27 that's joining us at the table right here is going their head like, okay, okay. 00:15:31 You got me talked into it. It doesn't have to be pretty. Where do I start? Well see, that's the, that's the saving. 00:15:36 So if you start trying to cut inputs in a, in a year like this, now I had an old farmer tell me last week. 00:15:40 He said, he said in 10 years, you're gonna have two great crops. You're gonna have two terrible crops 00:15:45 and you're gonna have six average crops. He said, that's been proven that the data proves that. Yep. So, but if you cut the cost in the wrong place, 00:15:53 and I did some of that this year and it cost me money. I don't need potash here because I've got two tons of litter here. 00:15:59 You know, cottons a potash lover, right. Hog or whatever you wanna call it. Bastard, whatever you wanna call it. 00:16:05 But, uh, you can cut if you're, that's my first place I cut costs is tillage. You know, we've got, we've got probably 2,500 acres 00:16:13 that we harvested the beans on, applied the litter on and didn't do anything else to it. Now it's a little bit mind boggling. 00:16:19 We didn't cover that litter. Yeah. Is that litter gonna stay there? Is it gonna wash down? Is it gonna, you know, we got some small rain. 00:16:24 Your concern was do you then, uh, do you have stratification on the top and it doesn't get in there without incorporating, 00:16:29 but you're also saving, what's it cost you to till $18 an acre? $24 An acre? Probably average pass 00:16:35 is 10. Okay. 12. Something like that. Where do you think people cut back? Where do you, where do you go ahead 00:16:40 and accept, uh, a a little less pretty but more profitable? So since you said that, I see 00:16:47 the country countryside as a whole. There's places that you go to in let's say Nebraska Co Dakotas, um, 00:16:58 Minnesota and starting to get parts of Iowa that the last thing that they will give up is your infra fertility pass. 00:17:07 And that, that's all due to environment. Mm-hmm. Because, you know, if when you're planting into cold soil, maybe wet soil, um, that's, it's essential 00:17:18 that you have infra fertility. Now the, these other places, um, maybe you look at cutting back your, some percentage of your dry fertility. 00:17:30 I'm not saying give it up, but I mean we're on year four of a, of a, um, study at the PTI farm in Illinois that shows 00:17:41 that you can cut back half of your dry fertility, broadcast dry fertility in lieu of 50% put, put it put in a band fall. 00:17:54 So it's about in the fall. In the fall. That's right. Because that's the, that's the best, best time to, um, to strip till is fall corn. 00:18:06 I'm with you. I mean, you get in the spring and it, you may be rushing it and may be wet and then you're, you're really doing more 00:18:12 damage than, than good. So Profitability standpoint use and that doesn't necessarily change the pretty factor. No. It's, but it's Not about, 00:18:20 but it addresses the profitable addresses profitability factor. Well, let's look at the, let's just, 00:18:25 let's just play devil's advocacy and look at some of the studies mean you've done. So you think we, 00:18:32 So we've, and we've been doing kind of the same thing about do we, do we ban liquid? Do we ban dry? How much can we cut back? 00:18:41 Do we ban liquid and dry? Right. Where's it at? So what what we've been doing is we've been banding dry and then coming back in the spring 00:18:52 and faning liquid on top of that. Yeah. And getting all that heavy load, uh, a lot of the heavy load off the planters. 00:19:01 Is that increase, is that increase expense, decrease expense from keep expense the same? Just reapportion, 00:19:06 We've done all three And you're, you're bet on Reapportion. We, we, we've done all three. 00:19:10 We've, we've tried, we have, Tommy and I have literally tried to prove this thing wrong. Yeah. Like we tried to double it up 00:19:17 where we went a full load of dry and a full load of liquid and we went backwards on yield 00:19:23 and then we went a piece of load of dry and a full load of liquid and we've stayed even. But then we've been at a, been at a light load of dry 00:19:32 and a light load, but multiple loads of liquid in my soil type, which is a seven to nine mm-hmm. CCCs. Right. And we've done the best saying 00:19:41 that we can't take a one and one and done application. That's what we're trying to get at. You can't take a one and done application In my soul, 00:19:49 now we get up Midwest where it's 15 or twenties, you know, or whatever it be 11 to, you know what I'm saying? 00:19:54 Like it's possible, but there's no one way to skin the cat. But that's, this is the year that you're talking about 00:19:59 that we're gonna have to examine all these for your area and not say, oh well Matt down there, 00:20:04 he throws this up like it works good. Like you better be Matt's neighbor. I think the biggest adjustment 00:20:09 besides all the agronomic ones that you guys are talking about is the mindset one about it's okay to have a field the name pretty, again, 00:20:15 I know you got the landlord issues to feel. Mm-hmm. But that's the tough one. I think we asked the question pretty versus profitable. 00:20:21 Perfection versus profitable. And we invited you to come to this table like we do for all of our episodes. 00:20:26 The green. We're sitting here with Tommy Roach with Nature's, uh, the sponsorship of this show. We also got some of their goodies on here. 00:20:31 Nature's products are fortified with Bio Kay. That's their technology that goes into their fertility programs. 00:20:37 Uh, the products that you can put into your programs mostly, uh, in furrow 00:20:41 and putting the fertility exactly where it needs to be. Really exciting. Extreme Ag, that's who these guys started. Uh, the organization they invented four years ago 00:20:49 is, uh, a sponsor by. Okay. So you know what, check it out. Learn more@natures.com. 00:20:53 So next time, thanks a lot for joining us here. We ask the question pretty versus profitable, make some adjustments. 00:20:59 You know what, you come here for a drink, come here for a visit. You might even learn something. Till next time, 568 00:21:03.225 --> 00:21:04.205