Farming Video | How Matt Miles Uses Sap Sampling in Cotton for Better Nutrient Timing

00:00:00 Here this afternoon, we're in about 110 degree heat index today. Uh, found us a a shade tree. 00:00:06 Jacob, I want to talk a little bit about you. You've heard the buzz word, you know, especially with extreme ag and calibrated agronomy about SAP samples. 00:00:14 Well, we, we've kind of dipped our toe in the SAP samples. We've been doing some in the corn, 00:00:17 been doing some in the soybeans and, you know, we figured out that we wanna do it in the cotton too. 00:00:23 I've had a lot of good luck with these cotton plants actually reacting to some of the things we do. 00:00:28 Mm-hmm. Maybe a little better than corn does or soybean does. It may be because we've been doing it so long 00:00:32 with corn soybeans and we're seeing new things to do with the cotton. These are not the easiest thing in the world 00:00:37 to do when you're talking about a cotton plant. Uh, Jacob with, uh, with live Oak agronomy works with us here on at Miles Farms. 00:00:45 Uh, he's gotten into this and, um, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna attempt, or Jacob's gonna attempt to show you 00:00:51 how to sap sample a cotton. Tell us what you do if you go the field and, and you're gonna pull a sap sample for cotton. 00:00:57 First thing you wanna do, and it's, that's hard to be, to do lately because of this air temperature at night and then getting low. 00:01:03 The lab asks you to do it whenever it's 80 degrees or less, but you know, the night, I mean, you know, 00:01:09 you wake up at five, five o'clock in the morning, it's only 78 and it, it gets 80 just as soon as the sun comes up. 00:01:13 So that's kind of hard to get done. Um, you gotta do a dry sample just like you do in corn and beans, just like you would do on a tissue sample. 00:01:19 You don't want a wet plant or anything like that. But the, the lab asks you to do the newest, uh, the newest viable leaf, which would be this leaf right here, 00:01:28 right off the top of the, where the new, um, squares are coming out. And pull that leaf and then put it in one bag 00:01:35 and you're gonna come down to the bottom of the same plant and pull the oldest viable leaf. 00:01:39 So whenever you come down to the bottom of the plant and start looking at the, at it, um, you see these, these leaves on the bottom, those aren't your new leaf 00:01:48 or your old leaves that you're worried about right now because there's no fruiting branch on them or anything like that. 00:01:52 So we're gonna twist around here to this side of the plant and get on The first node of fruiting, No, the first node, 00:01:57 the first fruiting node and go out here to these, these larger leaves and pick the oldest largest, most viable leaf you have. 00:02:05 So, I mean, we got two right here. I would say I'd pull this one just 'cause it looks a little bit older than this one does. 00:02:10 And you just go around and you gotta get 80 grams of old leaf, 80 grams of new leaf and put it in two separate bags. 00:02:15 Keep it cool and ship it off. Yeah. Overnight. So 80 grams of, of cotton leaf is gonna be a minute. Right. You're 00:02:22 Gonna be 80 or so plants. It's not gonna be one of those things. You just jump out there in five minutes and get it done 00:02:26 or 10 minutes you get it done Whenever you're doing corn, especially bigger corn, you know, you can get 10, 00:02:31 15 leaves in just a few minutes and you're gone to the next field. That's pretty easy whenever you go to doing cotton leaves 00:02:36 or, or bean leaves, it takes a little bit more time. You know, we're not, we're not saying you need to go do every field you got, 00:02:41 but this sap sampling along with the rapid soil test Correct. Is a really good way to know 00:02:46 what nutrients are in your plant and what nutrients to predict you're gonna be deficient on as time goes. Is that right? 00:02:51 That's right. And it gives you more time, you know, with a tissue sample it's a snapshot kinda later in the, the needs by doing the sap, you get 00:02:59 that information a little bit earlier to where you have a little bit more time to react. And cotton's a reactive plant when it comes to, 00:03:05 to nutrients anyway. And that's what's cool about to me about the SAP sample is you're, it it, it's telling you what's gonna happen in two weeks. 00:03:13 You know, when you pull a tissue sample, most of 'em are pulled because there's a deficiency in the plant. Right? Right. I can go out here right now 00:03:18 and find potash deficiency, pull those and I know before they get there what it's gonna be. It's too late to do much about that. 00:03:23 And you know, you're gonna have calcium deficiency. I mean, it's Cotton a hundred percent. 00:03:26 So call Jacob with live oak agronomy 00:03:28.445 --> 00:03:30.365