Enhancing Cotton Yield with In-Furrow Technology
Building on successes he has seen in corn over the past few years, Matt Miles talks about his in-furrow program in cotton farming.
00:00 So when we started this infer thing, you know, it kind of started out with, with corn, I'd say the biggest percentage of people that run in furrow, 00:06 if they run in furrow, that's a low percentage of people. They've done it on a corn. 00:10 We try to take this same process into soybeans and cotton haven't had a, just a great success with the soybeans yet. 00:16 We're still working with that. We're gonna have some major replicated plots this year out with different partners to, 00:21 uh, you know, to see if we can, you know, pick up an ROI there. Definitely picked it up in corn. 00:26 One thing we started seeing is we started testing products with our partners and just on our own is that, you know, 00:31 cotton cotton's kind of been the, the, the lost dog here for several years when corn prices and bean prices went up. 00:37 You know, a lot of farmers, including myself, got away from cotton because the multiple trips and, and the high expense to grow it. 00:43 As things have kind of come back into line, you know, cotton's a big player in, in the Delta now in the Mississippi, Arkansas Delta. 00:49 So, you know, we, we never quit growing it. We've always stayed with it. That's what brought me to my dad, brought me to the dance. 00:54 My dad, my dad grew cotton, so that's kind of where I started. You know, we've always been told, be careful 01:00 with infers on cotton because you know, you can kill the germ pretty easy. So for years we put the cotton, the corn infer out, 01:06 didn't mess with the cotton concept. Agritech come to us and said, we have an infer you can put out on cotton 01:10 that I promise you won't hurt your germ. I promise you it won't hurt your stand. So the first year, I think we had 40 acres 01:16 and you know, we were plus 50 70 pounds. I don't remember, this has been a minute ago. Next year we went to 200 acres 01:22 and same thing, you know, somewhere double digit increases for sure. Definitely an ROI, third year lane come to me 01:29 and said, dad, you know, we've done this three years in a row. We increased acres a third year. 01:33 He said, dad, we've done this three years in a row. Why don't we go whole hog? I mean, it's proven itself for three years in a row. 01:38 That's one thing we like to do is see products prove their self at least two years before we put 'em as a grower. 01:44 Standard practice Today concept Agritech infra program for our Cotton is Grower Standard practice through our little retail business that we, we piddle with. 01:52 We actually done some plots with some guys. We got some pretty outstanding numbers on those. You can see here as far as germination, 01:59 our cotton planter probably we've got a new plate that they're working with with a speed planter. It's not a speed planter anymore. We like to heel drop. 02:05 What heel drop means is we plant three seeds every foot instead of what you call drill in or stro in the seed seed every, every three 02:12 to four inches I guess something like that. We feel like it's got more pushing power. And then we realized also a couple of falls ago 02:18 that we started looking off the picker and seeing whiter cotton in certain places in the field. And I went back and told Lane that 02:24 and he got on operations center, which is a, a lifesaver for us. And he said, dad, everywhere we're seeing those white spots 02:30 is where we heel drop the cotton. I would've absolutely thought it would've been different than that, but we were picking up, you know, somewhere 02:36 around 50 pound yield difference that year, the year before we didn't really do any tests on it, but we couldn't see those big white spots in the field. 02:43 So was that a one year fluke? I don't know. But I can tell you that we went back to heel drop. The John Deere speed planter did not 02:49 heel drop at that point in time. We worked with the engineers and come up with a plate that would work 02:54 as a heel drop plate. It just now don't become a speed planter. I went through all that To say this. You 02:59 can see our spacing's. Perfect. We've done a fantastic job here. This has got the infer on. It almost looks like there's more cotton up when we planted, 03:06 and I know that's not possible, but it kind of looks that way. So infer program in Cotton has been a real big deal to us. 03:12 We've been doing it now six years. Grower standard practice. It includes a product called Starter 2020, 03:17 which is 20% phosphorus, 20% cent potassium. It's also pre-mixed with a, a carbon rx. So we get our carbon piece in, in the ditch also. 03:25 And then we've got a micro pack and that micro pack from concept Agritech is called Micro pack. 03:30 But you know, there's several products out here, uh, several products that have the same similarities with other companies. 03:35 We chose the concept Agritech product because it was a good quality standard, you know, infra piece that we could do 03:41 and they could pre-mix it at the plant and it made it a whole lot easier on us to get a bulk load of this instead of some of the stuff in bulk load. 03:48 Some of it towed, some of it jugs, you know, we've tested the analysis on it after it's been sitting there a year 03:53 and it come back good too. So really excited about that. There's a lot of other products 03:58 that we piggyback on top of the infra. I'm just talking about the infra piece today because that's something that's almost basically 04:04 non-existent in our area to run in for infer and cotton. And we're seeing some pretty good results out of it. 04:09 So if you got infra, you know, capabilities on your, uh, corn planter and it doubles for your cotton planter, 04:15 I think it'd be a cool idea maybe to try, you know, get, get with concept agritech, try some of their products and, 04:20 and see what you think.
Growers In This Video
See All GrowersMatt Miles
McGehee, AR