What Crops Will Be Grown In Your Future Farm Fields? | The Granary
What Will Your Farm Look Like in 30 Years? (Hint: It’s Not What You Think!). In this episode of The Granary, Damian Mason digs into the future of farming. Will the next generation still be planting corn and soybeans, or will climate, water availability, and market demands push farmers toward unexpected crops—like peanuts, sorghum, or even camelina (whatever that is)?
The guys debate whether traditional crops will still dominate or if farmers will need to pivot to more sustainable and profitable options. They discuss shifting weather patterns, irrigation challenges, and how global markets might force new rotations. Plus, they share real-world experiences about how crop diversification has changed their own farms—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
One thing’s for sure: Farming is changing, and the key to success might just be keeping an open mind, and maybe even growing a little Milo, but don’t call it sorghum, unless you want a fight!
Pull up a chair, grab a drink, and join the conversation!
This episode of the Granary is brought to you by the good people at Nachurs.
00:00:00 What crops are gonna be grown in your fields when your kid is your age? You know, we don't grow the same things 00:00:07 that we did 50 or a hundred years ago. What's gonna happen in the next 30 to 50 years? That's what we're gonna be talking about. 00:00:11 But my friends, Matt Miles, temple Roads, and our friend Tommy Roads from Nature's in this episode of the Gravery on a farm, the work's never really done. 00:00:20 We're calling the day anyway because My friends from extreme ag are coming over. You ready for a conversation 00:00:25 with some real farmers about real issues? And the best part, you're invited, Support yourself a drink, Grab a snack. 00:00:34 Most importantly, pull up a chair. Welcome to the greenery. Hey Guys. 00:00:47 Alright. I threw it out there and the first thing we did, we sat down and talk. Matt looks at me, so I'm not gonna go 00:00:55 to him, I'm gonna go to you. What's gonna grow in these crop, these fields? What's these fields gonna look like 30 years from now? 00:01:02 What's gonna change? You? We, we say this all the time, and especially in fertility business, people are gonna grow corn in the corn belt. 00:01:15 I'm getting ready to say we've been doing that a long time. That's what they wanna do. That's people wanna 00:01:19 Corn. That's what they, because you know, this time of year we try to get people to fall feel fertilizer. 00:01:25 Yeah. Because we can't, we can't handle this just in time. Yeah. Delivered to the farmer. 00:01:31 And we always get, get feet or push back that, well, I don't know what I'm gonna plant or blah blah, blah. 00:01:38 If you're in Illinois in Or, or in Nebraska, in The Midwest, they are gonna plant corn. They may not want to take fertilizer now, 00:01:45 but guess what? They're gonna plant corn. 50 years from now. These fields out here in Indiana 00:01:50 by my farm, are gonna be in corn. I think you're right. But here's the thing. You said it's coming out in question. Don't Sure. 00:01:55 It's gonna change a lot much. You know what? You didn't grow corn speaking of corn until 2009 you told me, right? 00:02:01 Yeah. 2006. But after we, after, you know, we, we kinda, uh, I was sitting there kind of thinking about this. 00:02:08 My whole crop rotation from 20 years ago is a hundred percent different. So Why would it be unusual, even out of the question 00:02:14 to then ponder what lane is gonna, when Lane is 55 years old, that's 25 years from now, it's pretty realistic 00:02:23 that he might have a completely different cropping mix than you do that he does right now. 00:02:27 Well, and, and see, we, it's funny that, you know, I did look at you like culture shock. Like what are we gonna grow? 00:02:34 I'm, I'm at the advantage where I can grow multiple crops. So even though I've got crappy soil Yeah. 00:02:38 And I've got crappy temperatures, I've got five or six crops that I can grow in my area that temple can't. Maybe. And I know Kelly can't, you know, in the Midwest, 00:02:46 because the temperature, you'd Never able to produce cotton in Crawford County. Well, yeah. And I, if 00:02:50 you'd have told me 20 years ago I was gonna grow peanuts, I would've probably laughed you outta my, outta my shop. And now 00:02:57 You're considering. Well, I've grown 'em one year. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and, and, and as, 00:03:02 as these commodity prices are going down on the crops I normally grow, we're continually looking for an alternative that will not compete with the Midwest. 00:03:09 So if we could find some great crop that we could grow in the south Yeah. That they can't grow in the corn belt. Yeah. 00:03:15 Then that's a win-win for both farmers, Farmers. So I, I don't look at it necessarily that way. Um, I guess, wait a minute, let's back up. 00:03:25 I gotta, I gotta have a question for Matt. How hard was it for you in 2006, 2006 or 2009, whatever you said, um, to transfer 00:03:36 your rotation from one crop into a crop that you really never grew before? Was that hard on you? 00:03:42 It was a blessing in disguise. And, and and why? I'm saying that they grew some corn in Louisiana. So I had some buddies that grew corn 00:03:49 and it was so much easier to grow than cotton. Okay. Our ground had been in cotton for a hundred years. Mm-hmm. And when I say a hundred years, I'm not joking. 00:03:58 I mean that's a hundred years. Okay. So I knew what they were doing, I knew how they were doing it. 00:04:05 And when soybeans went to, when corn went to $4, it was a hundred percent profit for us. And at that point in time, cotton was down 00:04:13 to 52 cents, which is long. The biggest challenge for me was share rent. A lot of my landowners own gins or own stocking a gin 00:04:23 or their daddy told 'em, when, when we, when you inherit the land, this always needs to be in cotton because your only other option then was soybeans, 00:04:32 which was half the revenue of cotton. You see this in Lubo? Oh yeah. Alright. Just real quickly, there're gonna be some buyer 00:04:38 that's a, a dairy farmer in upstate New York watching this and they just in share rent and gins 00:04:43 and why that would influence the cropping decisions in southeast Arkansas and the delta. Explain. Yeah. So share rent as a percentage of the crop. 00:04:52 So if you've got one crop that's turning a better revenue than the other crop, you know, a lot of landowners tend to want 00:04:59 that crop put on their ground and they have the option to say, Hey, if you wanna rent my ground, you know, 00:05:03 you've gotta put it in this crop or you gotta put this many acres. I'm, I go through that now. 00:05:08 I've got a gin owner and what a gin I'm talking about is a cotton gin. So I have a cotton gin landowner 00:05:14 and he requires me to put x percentage of his farm to Keep the gin running, to keep gin running. That's that volume going through in the facility 00:05:21 to justify the expense of the gin process, cotton processing facility. I've got a guy with an ag service, you know, 00:05:26 aviation ag service and he is like, you know, if you rent this land, you know you need to use my, you need to use my plane. 00:05:31 So there's a lot of ulterior, ulterior motives. Not the word, but a lot of extending circumstances Yeah. In, in some of the decisions I make on the crop. So you 00:05:41 Point to Tommy, we're always gonna grow corn in Iowa. I think that's dead on. But you know what, we didn't grow soybeans in Indiana 00:05:49 to any appreciable level until well after World War ii. Really? The seventies is when it really took off. So to pretend that, you know, as 60, 50 years ago to pretend 00:05:59 that we wouldn't have something different 50 years from now is not out of the realm of possibility at all. 00:06:04 You're right. And we talk about around the fringe areas, which the fringe areas would be, you know, east coast, south, um, say the, the west, 00:06:17 you can grow a lot more different crops. I mean, who ever thought that you would have corn and soybean breeding stations in, 00:06:27 in southern Manitoba? Yeah. Right. North Dakota was never a We have that nat. 00:06:31 So, and who ever thought there's, they'd be going cotton in Kansas, right? Yeah. But we do. Yeah. So on the, the other part of it is, 00:06:40 you could ask the question maybe in Chad Henderson's farms, the crop that's gonna be grown is more Amazon warehouses. 00:06:48 Yeah, no kidding. I mean, he's growing houses like crazy more Vi more vinyl site Every time 00:06:53 that I've been down there twice now I haven't been to Matt's ever. Um, but I've been to Chads twice now. Whose 00:06:59 Fault is that Ever? Whose fault is that? It's my fault. Okay. It's my fault. Just wanna 00:07:03 Be careful. So I guess the point here is to take us that question. Do you see your, 00:07:08 we've already talked about the environmental thing and Marilyn and all that Alexandra little temple are your age. 00:07:14 Are they growing the same mix of corn, wheat, and soy? And then also you, you switched to sorghum on some of your acres? 00:07:21 I did. And I, we switched to sorghum on some of our acres. Sorghum Or Milo? Milo. 00:07:25 It's Milo. It's not sorghum. Don't say that again. It is Milo. You can, you can create a fist fight with some of these guys over sorghum versus Milo been 00:07:33 In fist Fight over smack a lot worse things. He'll smack you over a milo. So you're A milo guy too? I am. 00:07:39 Okay. So the Milo thing, um, that was grown under circumstances just like what, what mine said and the circumstance was, is we had areas 00:07:48 that dad came to me and he was like, do not throw good money at bad money if you plant that thing in beans, double crop behind wheat. 00:07:56 We took a hundred bushel of wheat off of there. He was like, and you're gonna go out there and plant beans and they're gonna wipe you out. 00:08:01 The farmer right down the street replant his beans three times and he still don't have a crop there. 00:08:06 And you're gonna go out there and do that again. Do not do that. Take your money from the wheat, leave the ground fallow and get out of there. 00:08:11 And I'm like, as a farmer, you just can't think about, if I have an opportunity to grow a crop, I'm gonna grow a crop. 00:08:17 So that's where that changed some things. Now we're learning a lot with the milo, the double crop Milo. 00:08:23 But until we get a little bit better, I mean, I have a really great market established. It's just not a great market for huge acres. Right. 00:08:30 So, you know, five or 600 acres, that's a great market. But if you wanted to plant a couple thousand acres, it's a little rough because where we have to go, um, to, 00:08:40 to get rid of our milo, where it's going is, is it's going to be exported. 00:08:46 Some of it'll stay in in bird seed, you know, for Home Depot get mixed in there. Some of it leaves out there population. 00:08:52 But here's the problem. You just don't pull into the mill when you want and you dump the load. 00:08:57 That doesn't happen. Yeah. It is a scheduled load at a scheduled time of the week. And you can only bring so many loads a 00:09:04 week on a certain day. Yeah. Well if you have truck failure, if you have this problem, you have that problem, 00:09:09 driver doesn't show up. Whatever it may happen, you get, you get passed by on that week. 00:09:16 Like so it is not one of them crops where you can grow a lot. Where I think this is gonna change for the future 00:09:22 for me is not changing a crop. It's changing the way we grow a crop. Take for instance, short corn. We talked about short corn. 00:09:32 You've tried it, you've seen it. The yield isn't quite there yet, but it's coming. Where I see it is, is we put it in test plots this year 00:09:40 and we showed it at um, my field day where you can plant the pinch rows of the tracker and the planter just in four rows 00:09:49 and take any normal sprayer and be able to do all those top applications that me and you do and we love so much without a specialty 00:09:57 sprayer. Yeah. To do it. Uh, alright, you're in an area, you're a Lubbock guy. I make this point. And ag people aren't to hear it. 00:10:05 We're gonna switch crops or switch to no crops because of water and lots of places not in southeast Arkansas. 00:10:14 A boatload of precipitation. The water table's here, not where he is. Not where I am. You're gonna have crops 00:10:19 that are different 30 years from now just because of the availability of water. I think. 00:10:24 So we're in a geography that has, last I heard there was 700,000 acres of drip. And when I say drip subsurface drip, that's 00:10:40 going to be about the only way given. And I, I'm not even gonna call it climate change, but there, there, 00:10:49 there's definitely a change in weather patterns. And it seems like everything is a shifted a month. Yeah. So spring comes a month later 00:11:00 and fall comes a month later. Um, and it, it has affected rainfall, moisture. 00:11:10 And so I fly in and outta Lubbock a lot during the summer, during the fall. And very rarely will you see a full circle of green. 00:11:19 It'll be half or a quarter. There's just, there's not enough water to grow a full circle, which is 135 00:11:27 or 260 acres. Yeah. There's just not enough water to do it nowadays. Yeah. So Is it fallow? Yeah. 00:11:33 It's just, yeah. Nothing. Well, All right. There's about six and a half million acres of grain sorghum 00:11:39 as my, in the National Grain Sorghum Association call it. And they said we could probably see a lot more acres 00:11:47 because of water restrictions. 'cause grain sorghum can handle drought. But as his point is where the hell's it 00:11:53 Go, you have to have a market. And so, like he said, there's a lot of it being exported. Uh, if you go to to Africa for instance, um, 00:12:04 green sorghum or Milo is a food state. If you go to Asia, China Yeah. They use Milo for alcohol. For alcohol. Yeah. 00:12:14 And it's the worst alcohol ever. Mm-hmm. Been there, done that. That's the rock guts Type that's it's called. 00:12:22 Just thinking about We can't grow Milo. We can't, we can't grow Milo. It's a great rotation of crop. Better for us. We have root non nematodes. 00:12:30 We can't grow Milo 'cause there's nowhere to dump it. There's no elevator. Yeah. In my area that will receive Milo 10 years ago, 00:12:37 you could take it in any elevator You want. Well, and that's the point. You've gotta have an outlet. 00:12:41 You know, the infrastructure has to come with the crop. Yeah. Uh, you know, we can grow. Well your buddy is growing 00:12:47 sunflowers here in Huntington, Indiana. We can grow sunflowers in hunting, but you gotta have somewhere to go with them. 00:12:52 Guys generally ain't know where to go with 'em. So I think that that's a build of market that you've gotta, you gotta grow over time. 00:12:59 'cause when the last time I was out here your way, um, visiting with, with my buddy and that was one of the first years that he was growing. 00:13:05 That was 10 years ago. Yep. And now he's developed it into quite a little niche. I think we also gotta address is 00:13:13 that there's the environmental reasons we're gonna change crops. There's the marketplace. There's also the surplus. 00:13:20 Why would we be growing corn in, uh, Western Kansas when they get four inches of Rainier when we don't need more corn? 00:13:25 There's a lot of places that don't need to grow a crop. Western Kansas, there's, I mean the only reason Western Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, panhandle, Texas, 00:13:36 there's a lot of places that would not grow a crop. Yeah. If it wasn't for irrigation. Yeah. And so maybe a little of them, maybe it goes back to, 00:13:45 maybe not all the way back, but maybe it goes somewhere in between. Where's it go? Temple? Somewhere in between. 00:13:53 I think that it's one of them things that it's just gonna take time to develop that new niche market that you're trying to find. 00:13:59 And maybe then you can start to switching to another crop. I think it's somewhere in between how many 00:14:05 Acres out of the 360 million crop land acres in the United States. And that's everything specialty, obviously 180 00:14:12 of it is just corn and soy. How many of those acres, when lane is your age, when Alexander's your age, how many of those acres 00:14:21 don't have anything on 'em? They have, they've reserved, they reverted it. I don't, I don't think, I don't think that'll ever come. 00:14:27 Uh, because you, you're talking about they're not gonna make more land. Um, we're getting better at growing it, 00:14:32 but the rest of, we're actually decreasing the, the the, the work. Yeah. The, the land is decreasing every year and we can, but 00:14:38 We're increasing our yield per acre. Yeah. But we're, there's a long time. At some point it's gonna, it's gonna shift the other way. 00:14:47 We don't, do we know when that's gonna be? There's probably an estimate out there. You know what I mean? Is it 2050 that that shifts 00:14:54 and there's so many people that we can't quite feed them. It's an awful lot of people in this world. 00:14:58 We're going to get to that point. We're gonna keep, have to keep growing more and more. 'cause they're not making any more land. 00:15:03 Well, we've been hearing that. That's been 2050. I don't, I don't agree that we're gonna run out of food 00:15:08 and we've already got more food. We waste 30% of what we've produced globally. What I'm wondering is, do we finally admit 00:15:14 California's lost a couple million acres just in the last few years because of the water issue. 00:15:20 Those acres that are in those places in environmentally sensitive that they just go, I think that there's gonna be, they go to tumble wheat. 00:15:27 There's gonna be some, some programs that come out that people are gonna roll out of agriculture and roll them back into Prairie Land. 00:15:35 And there's already stuff out there. You remember when we were kids, it was set aside. Yep. You know, the government actually paid 00:15:40 us not to plant. Right. I remember mowing all that set aside. You wanna talk about a nightmare? Yeah. 00:15:46 All that was was mowing MA's tails, all it was. That's all I can remember. Well then It made, that was the precursor to Conservation Reserve, 00:15:52 which has about 23 million acres in it. So does conservation reserve program go from 23 to 46 in the next 30 years? 00:15:59 Because we got land that's being farmed. But we don't need to. I mean, some probably should. Something's gotta, I mean, 00:16:04 I don't know what it's gonna be, but until the population and, and there's probably a, you know, two paths 00:16:11 that are gonna converge between the population. We keep hearing about 20,050. We keep hearing about the, uh, alternative fuels. Mm-hmm. 00:16:18 You know, where soybean oils are gonna take over in the jet jet fuels. And I mean, you hear all this, 00:16:23 you get all jacked up and excited about it. It's gotta happen. It's gotta happen pretty soon. It hasn't. I mean, I, in my area, if if something don't change 00:16:34 in the next six months, yeah. There's no funding to go government funding something come in. There could possibly be some land that won't be fun. 00:16:43 I don't think there will be. But there'll be some rent deals made where you're gonna say, man, I sold cheap rent. I wanna come down here. And farm 00:16:50 Acres don't go without getting farmed in India Acres. Go without getting farmed in marginal places here that used to because of water. 00:16:58 Right. Temperature. Right. Yeah. Most of the time that's, that's where you're gonna see it the most at. 00:17:03 You know, and maybe it gets into a point where, you know, look at the cattle market right now. 00:17:07 The cattle market's way up here because they're, we don't have enough cattle. You know, maybe some of this ground 00:17:12 gets put in and set aside. Maybe they come up with programs where they graze cattle on it and they, 00:17:18 and they start to produce three beef on it. You've got Cows, you're a cow guy. Your beef guy does temple. 00:17:23 I'm more of a show guy. He's got toilet hair. Yes. I got, I got now Kelly says it's seven. I got seven show have. Yeah. 00:17:29 Does Little Temple have a ba a big beef operation? Because there's a program that takes some of those acres that you're farming that are next to the Chesapeake Bay 00:17:38 and they say we want it to be in a permanent crop. And yes, you can graze it as long as it's not overgrazed. Is that where some of those acres go 25 years 00:17:47 From that, that could potentially happen. There's already programs out there now. Well, I mean, we have a cover crop program now 00:17:53 where we background cattle and we're allowed to take acres. We're not planting wheat. 00:17:57 You know, we're grazing those acres, those cover crop acres. So I mean, there is some funding 00:18:03 out there that can help with that. There's government programs out there that are paying pretty big money right now 00:18:09 to fence off farms. Mm-hmm. Ed Waterers and all these a aid shelters. Mm-hmm. And all this stuff, what they didn't have Yeah. 00:18:16 20 years ago. So that's part of what you're gonna see. The progression of trying to shift some acres out, which, what helped, that's what set aside did for us. 00:18:25 Mm-hmm. Set aside took that, you know, that surplus and it drew that surplus down for a couple years and it, and it did help. 00:18:34 It was a nightmare. And it Helped. And we're, and we're not asking for $7 corn. Yeah. 00:18:38 You know, we're asking $5, five 50 corn. You know what, $7 corn's not sustainable. No. 18 beans. You know, so we're just asking for something 00:18:48 that we can make an ROI on. And by the way, the person that's watching this, it's not a farm person says, 00:18:52 what do you mean it's not sustainable? You mean it's not gonna last forever because seven corn, it's too expensive. 00:18:56 Seven corn creates too many more production bushels of corn because, Well, $7 corn makes the feed industry sustainable. 00:19:03 Sustainable meaning financially. Financially Sustainable. Alright, we'll throw a few things out there. Camelina. 00:19:08 Are there gonna be more ignorant camelina when, uh, Alexander is his age or less? First You have to tell me what it is. 00:19:15 That's exactly what I was gonna say. I don't even know what it is. I mean, You're talking about all these special, 00:19:19 I don't know exactly what that is, but I mean, any one of these specialty things, It's an oil seed. It's 00:19:23 my understanding that came hemp is a L any of these other crazy, This that, like canola is my understanding. 00:19:29 It's oil seed that I don't know that it was derived from rape seed the way canola was, but it's a, it's an oil seed and it's a cereal type crop. 00:19:36 It's my understanding. And I, I've never, I was thinking it Was a cousin of th lane. I, I didn't know what the difference was. 00:19:43 Okay. I say yes, there'll be some because of the oil potential, will there be less acres of corn? 00:19:48 Not in the Midwest, but I think there will be because of the places that require too main resources to produce it. So 00:19:53 It goes, so it goes back to having a market. Yeah. Because the idea of, of hemp was not, not for THC purposes, but for 00:20:03 Rope and fighting Clothing for rope. That, that idea was great. But you had, and this was three, four years ago, you had all these people 00:20:12 planting hemp and it came down to it and they had nowhere to take it. The train Rate, they didn't have it. 00:20:18 It was awful. We had a guy come up and want us to grow 250 acres of it. And I mean this dude was serious. 00:20:24 Like he was, man, we got the money, we got this, we got that, blah, blah, blah. And I said, where's the infrastructure? 00:20:28 Well, we're working on it. Yeah. I said, so you want me to grow 250 acres of hemp and you don't have the infrastructure done? 00:20:34 No way. And none of it panned out. Right. They did a, they did a study where, um, you know, when they talked about the hemp, you had 00:20:42 to have a permit and all that other stuff. Yeah. If every acre that got permitted in that one year got done and they, 00:20:50 and they had enough infrastructure, if, if they had enough infrastructure, they would have enough CBD oil 00:20:58 to last next 30 years. That's Really, Boy, they really did their homework there, didn't they? Well, you 00:21:02 Well, I was one of the first ones to get a hemp license in Arkansas. And I mean, I thought this was my savior. Yeah. 00:21:07 And at the last minute I got to thinking about the little old ladies in church that was thinking that get hemp and marijuana crossed up. 00:21:15 I thought, right. I don't know if I wanna be that guy or not. So I didn't do it that year. 00:21:19 Every person in my county that done it kept it in their barn for about four or five years 00:21:24 and then it deteriorated and wasn't worth anything. By the way. That's a true example. I'm glad you brought that up because I've, I'm, 00:21:30 I had a guy on my, uh, my business of agriculture show and we talked about it and he, he made the point, he said, you tell the American farmer to produce something, 00:21:38 they will produce the hell out of anything. Yeah. And they're capable of it. And he is that. But nobody on the, 00:21:43 there was not ag people on the hemp side that understood. Right. What That's right. What would you do with it? Okay. 00:21:50 Um, I produce, I say there's some of these other things that are, uh, you know, some of these specialty type crops. But the problem of course is there's only 00:21:58 so much consumption on the specialty crop. That's where I think we get into it. Like where you can grow all the hemp you want, 00:22:03 you can grow all the camelina you want, you can grow all the sunflowers you want at some point. There's just, we got everything that we need. Mm-hmm. Well, 00:22:12 And I think that that's where these specialty programs that we're coming out with, that'll help pull back some corn acres and pull back some bean acres 00:22:20 and suck back some milo acres to try to get that into a balance. We talk about balance all the time. 00:22:26 We're, we need to try to figure out where the balance is with everything else. We're overproducing right now and we're, 00:22:32 and we're overproducing to the point that there's farmers going broke by overproducing. Now who in the hell would've ever thought that 00:22:39 that would ever happen if I had told my dad that 40, 50 years ago, look, eventually we're gonna overproduce to the point that we drive ourself right into poverty. 00:22:47 He'd punched me in the mouth. What do you see happening? I ask the question on the crops in DJ County, your lane's your age, 00:22:55 that's 30, 25 years from now. Five different things, but maybe peanuts is the sixth thing. What do you think is gonna happen? One thing goes away first 00:23:07 I think, and if you ask me that today, right now, corn will go away first 'cause it's the least positive. ROII 00:23:12 Did all your grain Bins, but then you, well obvious soy beans of rice. But then you look at, at the fact that, you know, I I, 00:23:20 I made a mistake this year. I, I I pulled my corn acres back to 800 acres. Yeah. Alright. So I think on the fields that I did that, I did 00:23:28 that on the fields that were behind corn, I made 10 bushel more beans. Yeah. And I made 200 pounds more land 00:23:34 cotton. Alright. So, so The rotation makes up for the price depression. So Yeah. So, so I, I, that's, if you asked me 00:23:41 what mistakes I made this year was pulling my corn eggers back, even though it was a loss. 00:23:46 If you look at a two year return, it was a net net return. So I don't know, I mean, as far as prices, 00:23:53 corn looks like it would have to go in the delta, but we need it for rotation. So Here's the deal. Agronomic 00:23:59 experts, I called you that in another episode. I didn't make a face this time. And these guys all, uh, they, they, I did. 00:24:06 Don't worry. So anyway, agronomic expert, there's a case be made beyond just supply demand and price. There's an agronomic case be made 00:24:15 for why you might grow something wheat, it's good for the ground. If you got a little curvy ground, you know, there's some, 00:24:22 there's some benefits that are not just the price. Does that influence what happened on these acres 25 years from now? 00:24:29 It might. And I'll reiterate what he said. So I'm in a area where it's cotton, cotton cotton every year. 00:24:38 And it doesn't happen so much now as it as it did in the past, but every year we'll get hail, 00:24:47 rain events in early mid-June past the, uh, insurance date and the people that went back with Milo, even though it didn't ROI. 00:24:58 Yep. That following year. Cotton crop after Milo was just what he said, Rang the bell because of the agronomic rotation. 00:25:07 Uh, we talk about the environmental reasons, we talk about government reasons, we talk about, uh, agronomic reasons. 00:25:12 Are there any reasons I I think marketplace is obviously the big one. Um, we're gonna say, well we used to grow a lot 00:25:18 of soybeans here and we don't need 'em. So then what? At some point you just, I'm gonna just go back to you gotta keep your eyes open 00:25:29 and don't, don't put your head in the sand. And if there's a niche market out there that takes you 10 years to build, 00:25:35 to get into something different, then just do it a little bit at a time. But don't just look at the very first one 00:25:42 when you go to put this forward. Don't look at that. Look at that one, look at this one and look at the next one. 00:25:48 Because Matt taught me that when we talked about putting sorghum in two years ago. Um, he said, there's two things that you can do great 00:25:55 for your soul, peanuts and sorghum. And those two things are gonna be sorghum. I mean, Milo two peanuts and Milo. I made a mistake. 00:26:02 It wasn't sorghum. Yeah. I didn't know Milo had a milo uh, association. Like they have a national sorghum association. 00:26:10 Does there a national milo Sure. Is A drive by it back and forth there, Sorghum. No, there's 00:26:16 not. Anyway, So when, when you go back to that and you look at the next crop behind that, like the soybeans that came off behind that crop after that, yeah. 00:26:26 Were unbelievable. That was the single best fields that we had this year. And those were the poorest ground that I've had, 00:26:33 that I've, that I've dealt with. So don't just look at that first crap. Right. Look at the one behind it. 00:26:39 And I made a great point about that because it does change something in your soul. Soul. I'm Hoping it's gonna be unrecognizable. 00:26:44 Let's just say that you come back, it's say you come back 50 years from now, presumably you and I are gonna be on 50, let's say that you come back. 00:26:54 I don't think it's gonna be unrecognizable, but I think it's gonna look a heck of a lot different just because it looks a heck 00:26:58 of a lot different now other than the cotton, which you, you pointed out already. 00:27:02 There's less acres in cotton in DHA County than there've probably been in your Lifetime. Yeah. Well 00:27:07 when you come back to Midwest, it's going to look a lot closer than what it might might in the delta. Yeah. 00:27:11 So I'm gonna throw something else out. So we talk about what's it gonna look like in the future. Um, we're now in a global market. 00:27:22 Yep. I mean, not only are we we dealing with what's happening in in the US or North America ly you're dealing, this is a world market. 00:27:30 So maybe whatever you said while ago, this, this new crop, whatever it is, Dan Molina, Maybe there's something that's grown in 00:27:41 Uruguay or or Brazil or, or Turkey or something that makes its way this way. Like corn has made its way to South America wheat, you know, 00:27:52 and and Russia, we been Everywhere forever. Forever. I know. Yeah. So maybe there's something that we don't know No yet that we're going through, 00:28:00 but yet it's, it's grown somewhere Else. That's what, because we have to keep our eyes open. 00:28:04 When you take, you take cotton for instance, you know they're, they're smoking down the rainforest in Brazil. 00:28:09 Yeah. Their cotton production is three times what it was five years ago. Yeah. So what is that doing to the world market? 00:28:16 Well, because it means we don't, we don't, we don't domesticate the cotton anymore. It's not domestic use. It goes overseas. 00:28:22 They make the clothes, they bring 'em back. So You how many crops over the years? Talking about what Tommy said a minute ago 00:28:28 that we've grown over the years. I mean, I remember as a young boy, we grew edible beans and dad always said, oh, we're growing these edible beans 00:28:36 this year for the Japanese. And we did that and it didn't turn out. Then we grew, um, these other edible soybeans 00:28:44 that they were making potato chips out of. And that worked out for about two years. And then that went away. And we thought we 00:28:49 had a market established. It was even a little bit of a Ponzi scheme. Um, or a pyramid scheme where the producers 00:28:59 and landowners were putting money in. You know what I mean? Like back in the day when $10,000 was like the same 00:29:05 as a hundred thousand dollars a day, that's what they were asking for to get involved in this. And I did it. Dad did it. 00:29:11 Some of my landowners did it and it went in the toilet. But we were trying to, we were trying to establish a market where we could go to the next place. Go to an end user. 00:29:20 That's the key. That's the key. That's the key is y'all were trying, maybe you fell at it, but you gotta continue to try to find something 00:29:27 that will that we, we grew, Right? We grew, We grew canola there. We've grown everything there. 00:29:32 Well I did the yellow P deal, you know, it's supposed to be great where I'm at. And I did the yellow P deal and they all froze. 00:29:38 You know, it's worked out for a long. People talking about yellow peas, those chunks up in Montana are making really good money on 00:29:44 edible beans and lentils and all that stuff. They didn't grow that in the old days. They were wheat and yeah, wheat. 00:29:49 Uh, two miles from where we're sitting right here is Flax Mill Road. I was raised at the very end of it. My dairy farm was. 00:29:54 And I can tell you that there has never been a flax field on Flax Mill Road. There's never been Flax Mill on Flax Mill Road. 00:30:02 So at one point, long before Damien Mason was born, there was Flax Huntington County. Yeah. Mill. That milled it right there. 00:30:08 So I think it's gonna keep changing. I'm leave right there. Thanks for being here. Until next time, I'm Damien Mason, 00:30:12 my friend Matt Miles, temple Roads and Timer Rhode coming at you from the Green, won't you to pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink 00:30:18 and join us for more of these awesome episodes. 'cause it's Farm Talk, real issues, real conversations with real farmers. 00:30:24 I also wanna thank my friend Tom Roach here. Tom Roach is with Nature's Nature's an awesome fertility company. 00:30:29 Their products are all powered by bio. Okay. And you know what? We Extreme Ag or the official sponsor of Bio Okay, can learn more 00:30:36 at the Nature's website. That's right. Go to natures.com. Until next time, thanks for being here. 786 00:30:41.075 --> 00:30:42.445
Growers In This Video
See All GrowersTemple Rhodes
Centreville, MD
Chad Henderson
Madison, AL
Matt Miles
McGehee, AR