Farming Video | Matt Miles' Guide to Smart Soybean Desiccation Timing

00:00:00 So guys, we're coming up on the time of year that, that everybody loves to talk about, which is desiccation. Uh, we've got some fields. 00:00:06 We got a field we're gonna show you here, uh, in a minute that we desiccated last week. 00:00:10 It's a dry land field just to kind of get our feet wet, you know, it's about a eight acre field. See what we're gonna get off it, dry land. 00:00:17 But our irrigated beans are, they're getting about ready. When you say Jacob, um, you can look at some 00:00:22 of these nodes on these beans. We always, always look, everybody's got a different way of looking at it. Probably the best guide to me is there's a Syngenta picture. 00:00:31 Mm-hmm. And if anybody needs it, you can, uh, you know, holler at me, I'll get it for you. But there's a Syngenta picture that shows not ready, 00:00:38 ready, absolutely ready, right? And you look at the color of the pods, but then you start saying, okay, I can go down the bottom 00:00:44 of the plant and I can find all kind of brown pods in the bottom of the plant. But then you get up here and they start getting 00:00:49 greener, you know? So what I like to do, I like to look at the top four nodes, and if I've started getting some yellow pods 00:00:56 and these top four nodes mm-hmm. You can see on this one, I've got three brown ones. But if I start getting some really good discoloration pods, 00:01:03 then I'm fixing to probably, you know, put the sprayer in here. So, you know, this is a couple different ones with, with, 00:01:08 you know, with four nodes on it. So, you know, like I said, everybody's got a different opinion on how to do it. 00:01:13 Jacob, what's your opinion? Very similar to that. You know, I wanna be, I wanna have some good straw colored pods on the top. 00:01:20 I wanna look at some of these laterals and make sure that they're not, you know, too green or we, or we got any problems there. 00:01:26 Um, then after that, it's just looking at the leaves and, and seeing what kind of leaf colors we've got 00:01:30 and how much leaves are gone. You know, several leaves are already off of this plant compared to what it 00:01:34 was three weeks ago. Yeah. Hot temperatures. Plants are changing fast. Absolutely. Um, you can get in a situation where you wait too long 00:01:43 and there's a label restriction there. You've gotta stay within that label restriction. You wait too long, you'll have nine or 10% beans, right? 00:01:49 You're trying to cut. So pay attention to your labels. Pay attention to your pods and just make sure that you, you know, I always say this, 00:01:58 desiccation is definitely not a science, it's an art. Yes. You gotta learn how to do that. Learn how to manage your machines 00:02:03 and, you know, when you think you can do it. We think these beans are ready for desiccation. Probably Monday. 00:02:09 We may wait until Wednesday just to be a hundred percent safe. Jacob's gonna ride around 00:02:14 and look at 'em, uh, first of the week or, you know, or this weekend and see what he thinks. But, uh, we'll go up here in just a minute 00:02:20 and show you a field that we have desiccated last week, kind of what the progression is on it. 00:02:24 Video. These are beans that we desiccated. Uh, I've got a couple of trials going on here. Uh, it's 20 ounces of gramoxone, I think I said earlier. 00:02:34 It's 24, 20 ounces of paraquat ounce and a half of full tech oil. What we've done is we come in here last week, 00:02:40 you can see the beans on my right. Well, it'll be on my left. You're right. Beans on the right. We're done last week. You can see 00:02:47 they're starting to get a little crispy. Still a lot of green pods. Still a long ways to go. But, you know, we did these, 00:02:53 what we considered maybe a little bit early. The beans on my right were done three days ago. So, uh, with that rate, we're just trying to figure out, 00:03:02 you know, some, one of the biggest dangers you can do is, is to desiccate too early. 00:03:07 And what we've seen by desiccating too early, when I say desiccating too early, you know, some of those pods, you know, when you open the beans up, 00:03:13 you'll have a, a tan bean. But when you slice that bean open, there'll be a little bit of green tint to it. 00:03:19 And, uh, you know, some elevators will consider that damage. Some of 'em won't, some of 'em do. 00:03:24 So you have to, you have to kind of know where you're going with the soybeans and also, you know, you know how 00:03:30 that kind of, how they grade. But, you know, the, the big thing about desiccation, you know, it's a, it's a, it's risky at times. 00:03:36 If you do too many acres and you don't get 'em harsh till you get a lot of weather, um, you know, if you don't do 'em quick enough, 00:03:41 you've got a label to follow, then there'll be 9%. So there, I say this all the time that, you know, desiccation is not a, a science as much as it is an art. 00:03:51 Last year we did some, you know, similar type trial. We did 16 ounces, 20 ounces, and 24 ounces. Uh, we felt like the 20 ounces 00:04:01 and the 24 ounces was probably one of those two is the way to go, depending on, you know, timing and, and weather and, 00:04:07 and you know, what you're trying to get done. 16 ounces we thought was a little bit light. Now we were running 10 to 12 gallons of water last year. 00:04:14 We ran 10 gallons of water on this. But we are looking at some, some concentrated levels where we're using less water. 00:04:21 We will be looking at that, where we're using less water, adding more, uh, of the full tech oil 00:04:26 and the full tech adjuvant. And I think we can, we'll see some similar results. Be able to use less water. 00:04:32 The thing about desiccating beans is we're not gonna be in a hurry. Uh, you know, where you're trying to get, you know, seven, 00:04:38 800,000 acres a day with a sprayer, unless you can harvest a thousand acres a day, you don't want to be putting a thousand acres 00:04:45 a day worth of det out. So it's kind of a slow pace. Uh, we usually try to every day do about what we think we can harvest when the time comes and the, 00:04:53 and, and, you know, the waiting period's over. How many acres can we do a day with the harvest equipment we have? 00:04:59 That's all we try to do in a day's time. And amongst of that, we've also gotta be watching the weather to make sure we don't have a extended rain event 00:05:06 comes in here and delays harvest from there. So there's a lot of tricks. You know, I know we talk about it every year trying 00:05:12 to figure out, you know, when's too early, when's too late. Uh, you know, this is a relatively new thing. 00:05:19 We've been doing it several years, speeds our harvest up by about a week or two. But there is some, you know, 00:05:24 there is some places where you can get in trouble. You know, there's some risks, there's some reward. We feel like there's more reward than there is risk. 00:05:32 So we pretty much desiccate every acre we have, uh, just a lot of efficiencies through harvest. So if you're gonna try some of this, you've never done it 00:05:39 before, you're welcome to call me or any of the guys with extreme ag and just dip your feet in the water. 00:05:45 If you hadn't done it before and you haven't got your own reactions on your farm, dip your feet in your water. 00:05:50 Make sure that it's something that, you know, don't do a whole bunch of acres like Temple Rose did the 00:05:55.005 --> 00:05:57.245