Farming Video | Why Chad Henderson Avoids Fertility at Pollination

7 Jul 252m 22s

Chad Henderson of XtremeAg walks us through his current irrigated corn strategy, emphasizing how he times fertility and fungicide applications for optimal yield. With recent wet weather eliminating the need for pivot irrigation, Chad highlights why he used a late urea application around tassel and stresses the importance of avoiding fertility during pollination to reduce stress on the plant. He shares his approach from V10 to brown silk, breaking down how each pass impacts weight and yield, and encourages farmers to keep learning—even from what goes wrong.

00:00:00 Hey y'all, this is Chad Henderson with Extreme Ag and we just kind of give an update though. This is some of our irrigated corn, 00:00:05 um, that we're looking at. This field has had a urea shot on it, and that's something we don't usually do that much of, 00:00:12 but if you'll look at how wet it is out here now, we haven't run the pivot. We run it early in the year. 00:00:18 The rut you see to put a little fertility down, but we haven't run it since. So we've been getting ample rainfalls 00:00:24 to excessive type rainfalls. If you look at my wheat crop, you'll understand that. But this is kind of where we're at. 00:00:30 We come in here and we put some urea on it late because it was right at tassel, right pre tassel, and then some after tassel. 00:00:37 And that was just to get in the right form of nitrate to get it up through the plant. So we looked at ammonia form 00:00:44 and that's where we was trying to head toward with this. This also had a fungicide application on it, pret tassel. 00:00:51 And then what we'll do is we wait till these silks turn brown and then we come back with a pretty good load to put under it 00:00:57 after that in brown silk to where we can put the fertility down. We don't like to put any fertility down while this thing's 00:01:04 pollinating, it's such a time in the plant to where you've worked so hard all the way through this plant's lifecycle to all 00:01:11 of a sudden put fertility down when it's some mother nature type stuff going on here is just, to me, it's, it's, 00:01:17 the risk is not worth the reward. So we'll do one early, um, B 10, B12 with a PGR with boron, sugars, fertility, and fungicide. 00:01:28 That'll get us over into the brown silk then, and we make another fungicide pass and then we'll put on some more fertility 00:01:35 for late season Greenfield. Remember guys, when we're at brown silk, we're still way, there's still a lot of game left. 00:01:42 You know, we can still influence weight and remember, we don't sell bushels. We sell weight, which makes bushels. 00:01:48 So we're still trying to influence that part of it. So, you know, talk to some people your agronomy, check out the guys at Extreme Mag. 00:01:55 Uh, give us a call. I ain't saying we could fix your program by no means, but we'll definitely talk about the things 00:02:01 we've tried and the things we've done to influence weight, the things we've tried and the things we've done 00:02:07 that influence the wrong way. We do that too, so we make a lot of mistakes out here. But that's one that, that we try not 57 00:02:14.905 --> 00:02:17.505