Detect and address soil pathogens like fusarium

00:00 I'm here with my man, Connor slash Verne Garrett at Garrett Land Cattle. We're talking about soil pathogens. 00:05 An interesting thing was brought to my attention by these guys. He, he and Kelly, his father and cheese 00:10 and their agronomist, Mike Evans. And it said, you know what? We're discovering, we're discovering that soil 00:15 pathogens are a little worse than we thought. And then Evans said, maybe it's not worse than we thought. It's that there's a bit more of a burn associated 00:22 with the pathogens that are there and the costing us more than we anticipated. So, kind of expand on that. 00:27 We're at the back of the tailgate here. Uh, Vern just went out and grabbed a chunk full of good old Iowa dirt. 00:32 It looks really good. It's got good organic matter. It's got good color to it. Of course, it's a little dry right now. 00:36 But the point is, I can't tell by looking at this if there's an actual disease problem. What do you, what are you telling me 00:44 that you're discovering now? Yeah, so we've done some testing on these soils and there's, there's pathogens in there. 00:50 There's a decent bit of fusA present in this soil. And pattern ag is who we tested through. Is that all right? Yeah. Alright, 00:58 So, so, so pattern ag, uh, they sponsor my business of agriculture show. It's fine. It was safe to say 01:03 that their big thing is predictive agronomy. So with pattern ag testing, you discovered that you've got a greater concentration 01:09 of fusarium in the soil than you, than you knew or than you anticipated Uhhuh. Yeah. The number they threw out there was 32 bushels 01:18 to the acre that it could be damaging on a corn population in the, in the population levels that we have. 01:23 And, uh, that's a concerning number, right? Obviously. And so we're wondering how, how undiagnosed is this going? How many problems is this actually causing us 01:31 that we aren't knowing? When that fuer pathogen is attacking the root system, it's, it's attacking your ability 01:38 to form those symbiotic fungal relationships in the soil to drive nutrient uptake, right? 01:43 And it kills that root system off early. It kills your corn off early. That can rub a lot of yield at the end of the, so 01:48 The big thing here is that you've, you know, there's disease, corn, all that, but you know, your grandpa Jean would drive down the road. 01:54 It's like, that looks like a good field of corn. And you'd say, grandpa, we can't just drive by it. We gotta get out and walk it. So you got there 01:59 and walk it, you're like, that still looks like good field of corn. Is it kind of one of those hidden robbers? 02:05 Yeah, I definitely think you call it a hidden robber. It's not something you're gonna see unless you're out there cutting the stock, cutting the root, 02:12 and really understanding how that Pathogen works. Okay, so the pathogen gets in there 02:16 and it prevents nutrient uptake. Is that its thing, or or is it, does it, uh, end the plant's life early? 02:20 What is it about fusarium that makes it such a yield robber? Because it's my understanding, the more we learn about it, 02:25 it's, it's robbing a lot of yield. And again, we don't know about it. How, how's it work? Yeah, it, it hurts that root. Its whole life. 02:33 But the main, I think the main driver of yield would be it kills that off early. When you cut that, that uh, root crown open 02:40 and it's turned brown and harder at the end of the season, you're not getting anything up through there 02:43 and that's gonna kill the plant prematurely. Okay. So we talk about testing for it, which is becoming more and more of a thing. 02:50 Companies like Paraag, we can decide what our incidents of fusarium is. Uh, what do we do about it? 02:54 I know that seed treatment was something that we thought they handled the problem. It doesn't. No. They're, they're talking more 03:01 and more now that we need something in furrow. We need extra protection for that seed. What about then, do you think 03:07 that this is something we've, we have been dealing with for so long that we've come to accept it? 03:11 Because it seems to me that, that if you're already putting down enough nutrients and you're putting the seed out there 03:17 and you're spending the money on the diesel and the time and the cash rent per acre, 03:21 if you're losing 32 bushels an acre, it seems like a hell of a loss that we've been letting go for no reason. 03:25 Definitely is a hell of a loss. Definitely to me is not something we want to accept. I would say the fundamental problem is that we're, 03:33 we are selecting for pathogens like this, okay, our current practices, you know, we're shifting to a more regenerative background 03:40 and I would, I would expect that to help with this. When you're running continuous corn, you're selecting for corn like pathogens. 03:46 When you're running fertilizer, chemical, all the in, in excess amounts, all these different things that we're doing, you are killing your biology of your soil. 03:55 You are killing that microbiome. You're dwindling of the, the population of all your good bugs. 03:59 And what does that allow is that your bad bugs can expand and expand and expand and cause you greater problems. 04:03 So some of the practices that we've had, continuous corn, uh, you maybe even over utilization of fungicides, 04:09 et cetera, you think have contributed to the, uh, if you serum is always there, but we've made it worse 100%. The 04:16 more diversity you have in there, the more protected you are against any pathogen. 'cause they're all fighting it out constantly 04:22 for, for domination. And you need more bugs in there to fight the bad bugs. So you're gonna be testing your soil more 04:28 and trying to attack this from the standpoint of, uh, biologically of soil treatments and also some of your practice. 04:34 Exactly. Got it. His name's Vern Connor, Connor Garrett, but they've never called. That is Vern. My name's Dam Mason coming at you. 04:41 If you want more great agronomic practices, production, economic man, we covered all extreme ag. Go to extreme Ag Farm share. 04:47 This is, somebody can learn from it, it seems to me. And Vern, uh, just, uh, cemented it. We're gonna get a lot better at looking at the soil 04:55 and the potential for loss predictably. And I think that's what we're hearing here. So some testing. So we can say, wait a minute, 05:01 we've got a real high instance of this. We should probably take care of it with some different practices, 05:05 maybe some different products. Till next time, I'm Dam Mason. He, Vern, thanks for being here. 05:08 Thank you.