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From tissue sampling to sap tests. This is what we're talking about in the next evolution of crop management in the Demco Built to Move series, Agronomy Simplified, to help move your farm
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forward. I'm with Jason DeCavers of Demco. We're holding some corn here. I learned about sap sampling recently.
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I learned about tissue sampling maybe five or six years ago. It was pretty new on the scene. It's basically saying, "You know what?
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We do soil tests, but now let's talk about what's happening in the plant." And I can take this, send it in, I can see what's happening in this tissue.
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And you say, "That was cool. Now it's time for the next thing." Exactly. Tissue is a great eye-opener for people, right?
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Like, okay, just because you have it in the soil doesn't mean it's getting into the plant. So tissue is really kind of a reactive, like, okay, how was
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this plant built? And sap is next level looking forward. What is my next deficiency? Am I ready to fix it?
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Okay, so to do tissue sampling, I would pull these off from different parts of the field, send them in and I'd get an answer.
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But as you said, it was sort of looking back. Looking back, like what was going on in this plant a week or two ago, because that's when the sample was pulled and finally analyzed in the lab.
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With sap, it's a little bit more current. Exactly. So with sap sampling, we grab a low leaf- Mm-hmm
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... and a high leaf- Mm-hmm ... and then we squeeze the juice out of them. And when they squeeze that juice, you start to get a picture of what's moving
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through your plant. Okay. So for example, right now, if we pull a lot of our samples, we see deficiencies in the old leaf, not in the new leaf.
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It's cannibalizing itself already. So let's say we're cannibalizing phosphorus. We're moving phosphorus to the upper leaf.
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We should be making a phosphorus foliar application just to try and offset that demand or that draw.
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It was discussed in one of our videos way back when at XtremeAg, that tissue, you shouldn't react like this because you're probably reacting to something that was
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going on two weeks ago. With sap, am I going out there and doing it right now? My sap sample says this, it's time to go ahead and hit it?
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100%. When we get saps in our group now, send them Monday, get results by Wednesday. We're making applications by Friday, because we're
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trying... A lot of the sap deficiencies we see show up visually two weeks after we pull that sample. Okay, we're talking about simplifying agronomy to the viewer here, and then they're
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saying, "Man, I know this is pretty complex. I'm not sure if I'm set to do this." Is it really any harder to do sap sampling than tissue?
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It's probably a little bit easier, aside from some shipping things, some logistics, but it's a better picture. And so it's a much better way to manage your
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crop if you have room in the budget. Jason, how many pictures am I taking in the field? If I got a 160 acre field, am I grabbing it out of three places, four places,
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10 places? Most of our group does two. And then we actually start to see trends develop across our larger grower group.
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Now, there might be a field here or there that's a little bit out of range. But, as a whole, the trend goes the same direction.
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Does my expense increase and I offset it with yield, or do I actually get better? I'm guessing you're going to say you're probably more
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effectively putting on fertility at the right timing, and you're really going to keep about the same fertility spend.
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I would say keep the same or less. We just reallocate those dollars. So instead of just putting on a dry spread in the fall, blasting it out there,
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hoping it gets into the plant, we save those dollars for in-season, and then we are doing that much more efficiently.
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We talked before we started recording, it's not really versus. It's not tissue versus sap. You think tissue was cool, but it's time
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to move on to the next iteration. Exactly. And tissue, again, it gives you that picture of how that plant was built, and you might be able to change some things in your fertility program ahead of time
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using a tissue sample. But if you really want to be better at in-season management, you got to go with sap.
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Go with sap. So it's time to say, "Tissue is cool. It's onto the next thing." And if you never did tissue, go straight from not doing it to sap.
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Sap. Got it. He's Jason DeCavers. We're talking about the next evolution in crop management and how you can move your farm forward.
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We're simplifying agronomy here with the Demco Built to Move series. It's all about sap sampling. If you're not doing it now, we just gave you some
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simple tips. Go a little deeper if you need to. You can find resources from people like Jason, from here at XtremeAg. Tissue is cool. It's time for the next evolution. Saps. Sap testing.
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Sap. 00:03:46.260 --> 00:03:48.980
