Farming Video | Late-Season Fertility: Why Johnny Verell is Changing His Approach

13 Aug 253m 50s

Most folks used to think fertility applications had to be front-loaded early in the season, but Johnny Verell’s proving that’s old thinking. By spreading his fertility spend across multiple stages—V5, V10, V14, and late-season passes—he’s keeping his crop fed right up to the finish line. The kicker? He’s not spending more overall.

Working with his agronomic team, Johnny’s shifted some nutrients he used to apply early and moved them to later growth stages, when the crop can put them to better use. This includes nitrogen, potassium, and micronutrients applied with precision timing. Instead of paying for costly flyovers, he’s reallocated the budget to ground applications, making the process more efficient.

This season’s trials, both small plot and large-scale, are showing promising results despite weather swings—from a wet spring to a bone-dry July. Johnny says it’s proof that timing is everything in fertility management. The goal isn’t to throw more money or product at the crop—it’s to feed it exactly when it needs it most.

For farmers looking to push yield without pushing their budget, Johnny’s strategy might just be the model to follow.

This video includes paid sponsors of XtremeAg.farm. The views & opinions expressed in this video. are those of XtremeAg.farm and are based solely on theexperiences of the XtremeAg team. The use of brand names and/or any mention or listing of specific products or services herein is solely for educational purposes and does not imply endorsement by XtremeAg.

00:00:00 Spreading out your fertility spend and applying fertility even when you maybe in the older days would've thought 00:00:06 it was too late in the season. That's what Johnny Verell's doing in this field right here beside us. 00:00:11 Uh, you're doing experimentation with our friends at Nature's and the old you, meaning five years ago would've said, 00:00:16 I'm not putting on fertility when we're approaching black layer and now you're spreading out your fertility 00:00:21 spin. Talk to me. Yeah, So we've always kind of done some things, you know, somewhat with a fun, 00:00:26 with a fungicide application with an airplane, right? So sometimes I could be at an R two application, but you can only put so much in the plant then. 00:00:31 And so this past winter, I was talking to Tommy, kind of telling him what I thought some of my holdups were on my yield, the limiting factors I was dealing with. 00:00:38 He's like, look, let me build you a plan, start to finish. You just gotta be willing to do a couple extra 00:00:43 things throughout the growing season. So I was already doing like a V five shot. I was doing a V 10 shot. 00:00:48 So we were already kind of doing those. We put in some products there to address some micronutrients issues that we were facing. 00:00:52 But then he is like, Hey, what about it V 14? I want you to put your last slug of nitrogen in and then I want you to do a foliar shot at the same time. 00:00:59 So that's an extra shot that I haven't been doing. But we took stuff that I normally would kind of front load with in the growing season 00:01:05 and put it out there at the tail end. And so then after that phase there, you know, I was talking to him, he's like, look, you're always gonna do like 00:01:10 a brown silk shot, aren't you? And I said, yeah, we'll do like an R two R three shot. That's not a problem. So he came up 00:01:15 with some products there for me to knock out too. So he kind of, we took programs that we were already kind of, or products we were already doing, 00:01:21 but kind of spread 'em out and had a better timing. And then it, now it's up to the weather. 'cause here we are, it's been, what, three 00:01:26 weeks since it's rained here? What it's taught me is, is it's more about the timing than the application. You're a month away 00:01:30 From harvest. Are you done? Yeah, We're done here. Okay. The last time you went over this 00:01:34 and put a fertility product on was Two, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago. And so the question is, are you spending any more money? 00:01:39 Are you spending less money the same? It's roughly the same money. It's an extra application cost in there. Okay. 00:01:44 But I am, you know, spending same, so The same amount of money on the spend except for the application. 00:01:47 The application's a seven to $10 an acre. Yeah, Probably more like 15 to $20 an ac what we're doing. Okay. So you need to grab yourself five more bushels 00:01:55 of corn with doing that late, uh, spend right now on these commodity prices. Somebody might say at $4 corn, 00:02:00 I'm not gonna put the sprayer out there. One more time. Also, I knocked down a little bit of stuff you say, 00:02:04 Yeah, I wanna keep pushing that crop and feeding it with my budget I had in place. And so one thing he was telling me is I was telling him I 00:02:09 usually fly on some late season nitrogen. He's like, if you got the capability to do some wire dropping, how about we wire drop 00:02:14 that nitrogen and also let's add some other products like potassium and stuff like that for that late season shot. 00:02:20 Did you eliminate the cost on a flyover then? Yeah, We didn't u we actually used the sprayer to Do this. Okay. So you 00:02:24 can, you can actually take, can reallocate A little bit, Reallocate the money from there. So, uh, this is this gonna be a standard practice. 00:02:31 I think the coin for this could be a standard practice for us Late later season, later season, later season. 00:02:36 And then you'll know you made a mistake if you pull the Chad Harrison and you said, oh, that didn't do me any good. 00:02:40 I went on, I I I pushed it too long. Chad's motto, more is always better. It's probably not true on, especially on a year. 00:02:45 Like this year, you know, we started out so wet, so it was a good thing we didn't put it all out early. 'cause how wet we were, we had our yearly rainfall almost 00:02:52 by, you know, the middle of May for the year and then it's turned off dry in July. We've had one rain basically. 00:02:57 And you can see we got replicated plots all the way down through here. So this isn't just like one pass through the field. 00:03:01 This is replicated all the way down through here. And then Tommy asked me to do it. I did it on a 75 acre farm. Replicated too. Yeah. 00:03:06 So we got small scale plots here that we're gonna do at the field day. We also got a large scale to kind of rule out some, 00:03:12 you know, anomalies and stuff like that that's going on. Big Difference, what you did five years ago. Yeah. 00:03:16 It, like I said, it's almost the same budget. It's the timing. Yep. His name's Johnny Verell. My name's Damian Mason. 00:03:21 I'm coming at you from his field day in Jackson, Tennessee. You know, here at Extreme Ag we bring field days to you. 00:03:26 If you can't come here, we tape stuff like this. Also, if you're a member, you can get trials and data information for seven $50 a year. 00:03:31 You can become a member of extreme ag and you can come to any of these field days for free. So check out how our schedule rolls. 00:03:36 But until then, I'm Damien. And this is Johnny. We're coming at you from Jackson, Tennessee talking about late season 00:03:41 or spreading the fertility spend throughout the season. 00:03:43.825 --> 00:03:44.605