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Reducing the amount of water in your sprayer. You know what? It's costing you a lot of money to run back and forth and fill that thing up.
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You're probably using more water than you need to to get adequate coverage. According to my friend Johnny Verell right here
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with extreme Ag, you have been doing a big thing, now you're trialing reducing the amount of water to make this happen.
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So you actually get good coverage on a plant that has this much foliage. You've gotta have the right product mix.
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That's why our friend, uh, mark Baster here with spray tech's gonna talk to us about that. You started doing this a year
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or two ago. You're down to using Five gallons. Five Gallons of water per acre. That seems like crazy to most people. Talk to me.
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Yeah, so over the years we went from 20 gallons to 15 to 12 and a half, 10. We've constantly been reducing.
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And then this past year we started using a lot of spray tick, avant, and really just paying attention to the water pH and making sure the water pH, the hardness
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of the water, all that stuff was right. And as long as you got our sprayer that's got exact supply on it,
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you can keep your pressure at a certain level and have the right pH and everything with your water right on that you can get
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that penetration that you need. You can get the coverage you need and you can make sure the plant takes it up.
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And I think that's the big thing to take away is if you don't have that pH right, the plant's not gonna take up, whether you're putting out 20 gallons or five gallons mark,
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There's about nine things I'm worried about, and pH was not one of 'em. I'm thinking, okay, you've cut your water back by
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by one four or one fourth of what you were just a few years ago. You went from 20 gallons, 15 gallons down
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to 20, uh, down to five. So that's a big deal. Then I'm thinking about adequate coverage, then I'm thinking about sprayer tips,
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then I'm thinking about ground speed. Then I'm thinking about the fact that this thing has a whole bunch of mass of foliage and I gotta get that all covered.
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I'm worried about that and he's talking about pH, why do I care about pH? So pH is huge, especially with fungicides
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and some of our herbicides, uh, especially weak acid herbicides. So those prefer to be more in an acidic, uh, range.
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Um, and when you get outside of that, they start to half-life quicker. So you're losing that amount of active ingredient.
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Well, if we're keeping that pH down, then all the active ingredient is going out there on the plant, whether we're talking a fungicide, insecticide,
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or herbicide, any of that. So it's gonna be more efficient. And when he's talking about half-life,
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I don't think people really realize you get that pH over seven, seven and a half to eight. You're talking about minutes with
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insecticides and fungicides, right? Yes. Fungicides like two minutes. Some of those can half life out. You
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Can't get the sprayer out fast enough. No Big chip takeaways that from you now doing this, going from 20 to 15 to 10 to five gallons per acre, again,
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there's a lot of people are gonna say, I, I don't know if I can do that. What are your like one, two,
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and three big points on how to make this work? Yeah, X exact applies a must for us. You can do it without x exact applies.
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It's a lot harder, but it exact applies a must. The right tips a must. Having the right adjuvant to get
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that pH right is the big takeaway because once again, if you have it in there and your pH is not right and
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that plant's not gonna exorbitant or if the pH is too high and what you're spraying is dead when you
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spray it, you didn't really gain much. Do I need to spend a bunch of money? You said exact, uh, exact apply is important.
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That's technology. Do I need to, am I, am I gonna spend more on the technology than I'm gonna save? No. Okay. And then is there a number of acres
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that you think if you're only doing a couple hundred acres, you probably can't justify this, but once you
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get to a certain point And you don't have to have exact apply, you gotta set your sprayer up a lot different.
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What it allows us to do is if we wanna put out five gallons, we can. If we wanna put out 10 gallons, we can
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with the same tips. It doesn't matter. And then tips. Did you have to go through wholesale change or were these tips available?
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It's the, it's the same ones. We just go from running two tips going through the field to one when we go to low volume.
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Got it. So it's, it is an easy takeaway from this And obviously a product like this adjuvant because just makes the water work better. Yeah, it allows
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Us to fill up less, we get over more acres in a day, less hours on a sprayer. So that's a big savings to us.
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So I would tell everybody to try it and make sure they figure it out. You know, make sure they work with a
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company that knows what they're talking about. There's a lot of companies out there that's got adjuvants, but make sure they got one that
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really knows what they're doing. Because if you don't get it right on the front end, you'll never make it right throughout the season.
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His name is Mark Baer. He's with Spray Tech. They've got those products. You'll learn more about the products like your adjuvant.
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Go to spray tech Usa.com. Got it. Until next time we're at Johnny Verell Field Day. We're talking about new things
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that he's been doing on his farming operation to help you farm better. If you don't have time to come to one
00:03:46
of our field days, don't sweat it. Go to Extreme Ag Farm where you're seeing these videos or our Twitter or our Facebook or our YouTube
00:03:52
because we bring this information to you. Hundreds of videos that they have shot in the field, hundreds of cutting the curve podcast with me,
00:04:00
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