Farming Video | Can You Grow Crops on a $50 Per Acre Fertility Budget?

00:00:00 Maximizing your crop and the returns you get based on a budget for fertility. It's very important in this economic time. 00:00:06 And we are in this agricultural cycle where it might be here for a while. Stephanie Linco, agronomist with Agro Liquid 00:00:13 and Kevin Matthews w***e Act just did a presentation about this here in our booth at Commodity Classic. 00:00:19 We're giving you the Quick Cliffs notes, if you will. What I took from it, there's a whole bunch of different ways to get to yield. 00:00:25 You did a d way differently than it was done at Temple Roads Farm or whatever. You had six different farms, six different geographies, 00:00:31 and a whole bunch of different fertility prescriptions. You got to where you wanted to go, you know? Have, you didn't have a silver bullet, 00:00:39 but you also didn't have any duds. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We did something different. Every farm. We made the home farmer challenge two 00:00:45 of his counterparts and everybody, if you use good agronomy, got to that same point at the end. 00:00:50 So we didn't find anything super special, but we did find that if you're set on a budget and you spend those dollars, you can get to that top yield. 00:00:57 Did you have any big surprises? Uh, $50 really made it a challenge to try to figure out exactly how I can fit the whole program 00:01:06 in throughout the whole season. So the, And that's 50 bucks of, Uh, per acre of fertility products, total fertility. 00:01:13 And uh, so that's getting pretty lean on, on uh, soybeans and corn, which then some people don't put 00:01:19 fertility out on soybeans. But even in today's market, that's five bushels of soybeans. Yep. Um, so depending on your basis, 00:01:26 but five will pretty well covered. Bottom line is it did have ROI and it is worth the time to address it. 00:01:33 And you can do it at planning or you can do it throughout the season. You did this Stephanie, across wheat, corn, 00:01:39 soybeans, and cotton. And the learning that you saw was, and there was a whole bunch of stuff within each 00:01:45 of those, at each different farm. Whole bunch of different things. The learning, I guess I would take from it is there's a lot 00:01:51 of ways to get to the end. Uh, maybe we complicate it too much or maybe we don't complicate enough. You tell me. 00:01:57 Yeah, it was kind of funny seeing the guys, like where Johnny worked on it. It was a pretty basic program. Yep. 00:02:02 If you got Kelly involved, it had a million things in that mix, but when it came down to it a bush or two difference between them, it didn't really come out 00:02:10 that one was better than the other. So it's a systems approach, what you need. Are you gonna change anything in 2026 based on 00:02:16 what you learned in 2025 at your place or the other farms? Uh, we will every, we have so many soil types since there 00:02:23 so many challenges there. So the farms that are low in calcium, I'm gonna be heavy in calcium products 00:02:30 and the farms that are higher in calcium, I'm gonna take that component out and put one of the other components in 00:02:35 to address that lain Factor. Are you gonna do $50 00:02:37.955 --> 00:02:38.235 as your fertility spend per acre from now on? 00:02:41 Well, my operating loan ain't been approved yet, Damien, so I may have to, I don't know. 00:02:45 It is whatever farm credit allows me. The the Thing part about it. Seriously. Well that was the neat part about it. 00:02:49 It was a budget. It was a Budget, it was a hard known hard Line. We're at Commodity 00:02:53 Classic, they got banners over there of people getting four oh bushel corn or whatever it is. Great. You can do that. But 00:02:59 Did you make money? Money? You make money, you gotta make money. Yeah. Yeah. And some guys got a budget 00:03:02 that it was luxury spending. You know, Kevin had one that was pretty tight and that's what gets guys thinking, you know, 00:03:07 it's tight times sometimes you have to cut back and where is it best to spend those dollars? And that's where you're gonna have to be in 2026. 00:03:12 So you're not gonna be here. Right. Yeah, Yeah. No question. I mean, you're 00:03:15 gonna have to have a sharp pencil. Do You think you lost anything by cutting it back that much compared to your grower standard? 00:03:21 Um, in, if we, yeah, on the irrigated farm we probably did, but then on the flip side, we was not able to, uh, 00:03:30 fertigate any, so we couldn't have spent no extra money anyway. It is just the season, the way it worked out 00:03:34 on the double crop beans. I think it actually made us money. I mean it, you know, a lot 00:03:39 of people don't wanna put nutrition on there and to average 48 bushels on a double crop. Yeah. Uh, soybean is pretty good 00:03:45 for a dry land on irrigated, uh, planted in late June And you're in a fertilizer business. So a wrap up here, you don't really wanna go 00:03:51 around telling people, limit your spending when you're supposed to be in the business of selling fertility. But If you want that customer 00:03:57 to be here a year from now, two years from now, The customer's gotta make money. Yeah. That's the market we're in. Like you have 00:04:02 to spend those dollars the best way so they can come back next year. Stephanie Lanco Agros, AG Liquid, Kevin Matthews, 00:04:09 North Carolina farmer, and a guy who realized that he can cut back on fertility spend. And we probably all need to be doing 00:04:15 that when we're looking at where the economics are in agriculture moving forward. Damien Mason, coming at you from the extreme mag booth, 00:04:20 a commodity classic 2026. 00:04:21.645 --> 00:04:22.445