Breaking The Next Yield Barrier
Kelly says this 32-acre field is one of the most important trials in his farming career. The goal? Get the chemistry right and let the biology go to work. He believes this will be the key to breaking the next yield barrier.
00:00 Hi, this is Kelly Garrett, and behind me is a 32 acre field. That is one of the biggest trials of my life. It's a nitrogen reduction trial, 00:07 or maybe it would be better to say a calibrated agronomy trial. Mike Evans and I have established that our chemistry is further off than what we 00:14 thought. I've come to believe that agronomy is chemistry plus biology. The biology's never gonna act appropriate until we get the chemistry figured 00:21 out, and our chemistry's not on some of this corn back here has our normal amount of nitrogen, which would be anhydrous in the fall, 00:29 plus some planter applied in the two by two. Some of this corn out here has no nitrogen. Some's got just anhydrous or just two by two different variations of it. 00:37 We've also got different micros out here. We've got LIBERATE eight ca from agro liquid. We've got micro 500 and micro a thousand. 00:43 We've got Neutra kit from Spray Tech out here. We've got energy power from Stoler out here. Well, of course have source from Sound Ag here later in the year. 00:51 Different variations of this, because what we've decided with the balance is our ground mineralizes much more nitrogen than what we ever thought possible. We're short carbon, 01:01 we're short sulfur. We're short micronutrients. That's why we got the different trials out here where we don't have any nitrogen in the two by two. 01:08 We've got carbon and sulfur in the two by two trying to balance the nitrogen that's out there. There's about 48 rows with zero nitrogen. Uh, 01:15 my dad thinks that's gonna make probably a hundred bushel less. He very well could be, right? Remember, a year or so ago, 01:21 I had a soybean trial where I had 150,000 seeds per acre next to 34,000 soybeans per acre, and the 34,001 by three bushel, 01:29 whoever would've thought that that would happen. Now, I'm not predicting that the corn with zero nitrogen is gonna beat the other corn I feel to learn anything. I've got to do what others feel is radical. 01:39 I've really gotta move the needle. That's when we really get an education on what's going on, and it helps us figure things out. 01:44 All of these products are helping balance the nitrogen. All of these things we're trying to balance. If we can come into balance, I believe we can break the next yield barrier. 01:53 I'm not an advocate for saying we don't need any nitrogen, but I do think we're grossly over-applying it. 01:58 Our friends at Tru Terra really believe the same thing, and I find it very interesting that the sustainable farming I'm trying to accomplish with Tru Terra and the high yield farming I'm doing with my research 02:08 plots and my N C G A entries, those paths are converging, and I believe if we can figure this out, 02:14 we can raise higher yields in a sustainable way. I very much would like to break Francis Child's record in a sustainable method. I believe that is the key to it, 02:21 is figuring out how to come into balance with the ground balance with Mother Nature to let the soil reach its full potential. 02:28 I read the other day that the potential of a bag of seed corn is like 900 bushel per acre, and the national average is what around 180, 02:35 so we're at 20% of the potential. We're really not very good at raising corn, in my opinion. I, I'm not competing with anybody but myself, 02:42 and I want to continue to get better. That's what the extreme Ag Soil Health Initiative that we're coming out in partnership with ERO is about learning how to do better in a sustainable manner. 02:51 I really believe that these two paths are converging, as I said before, and that's what this is about. That's what this field is about, 02:58 farming in a sustainable manner to reach our potential and maximize our roi. That's the very definition of Extreme Act.
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See All GrowersKelly Garrett
Arion, IA