Farming Video | Temple Rhodes Experiments With Short Corn for Sprayer Access

00:00:00 Hey guys, it's Temple from Extreme Ag. What we got here is something a little bit different. So let me, let me just set this up. 00:00:07 So we, we messed with short corn years ago and we couldn't find a yield difference or we couldn't keep up with the yield of conventional corns 00:00:15 that we had out there, um, today. So what we did here was something very different. And what you see, as you'll see on this side as you, I mean, 00:00:23 I guess maybe you can see it in the field, every so many rows, we got a different planter that we planted with. 00:00:29 And here it's a little bit different just because a rain called us. So we laid the field out first 00:00:35 and what we did was is I've got two planters. One's a box planter, one's a bulk fell planter. But what we tried to do is, is we're only putting corn 00:00:46 in the center of this over here. The four rows, the pinch rows on this planter, this planter over here on this side, 00:00:52 all the rows are the same corn. So it's, it's the same. It'll, it'll come up and it'll be the same except for the pinch rows. 00:00:58 So the way that it's set up is, is we're setting it up for 120 foot booms on sprayers. What the idea is, is if I can get four rows 00:01:08 of corn in the center of the pinch row on this planter, and I set it up for 120 foot all the way around the headlands, the whole entire field, 00:01:15 any regular sprayer can go out there and, and accommodate, you know, any late spraying foliar fungicides, foliar feeding, 00:01:23 nutrition, whatever you wanna do in the field, we can do it. So we're, we're kind of handcuffed with our sprayers 00:01:30 where we can only do certain things unless we buy a heggie or we buy a lift kit or whatever. 00:01:36 This is a way that we can get around that. And we don't have to hire an airplane. We've already got a sprayer. 00:01:41 So we're trying to utilize that sprayer. If we can make this work, it's gonna show us a lot of different things. 00:01:46 Maybe we can fo your feed with higher rates of, you know, instead of putting on two gallons an acre, there's a lot 00:01:53 of times the airplane goes across the field. I can only get two gallons an acre on my field, or I can get five gallons. 00:01:59 Well, a lot of my foliar feeds might be five or six gallons of a foliar nutrition and I can't accommodate that. 00:02:06 So this kind of allows me to use my own sprayer. Um, there's a couple other things that it does. Remember I said that there's a, 00:02:13 there's a yield deduction, right? When we talk about this, this corn, well, in this farm, the way that I got it set up, that's only 7.8% to 8% 00:02:23 of the field is gonna be that short corn because the way that it's laid out to try to get 120 foot, you know, in order to get 120 foot, you know, 00:02:31 the one planter's gotta make, you know, it's 40. I got 40 foot wide planter. So I make two passes, 00:02:37 and then the planter that's got the short row corn in makes one pass. And that puts me at the center of 120 foot as we go 00:02:44 around the outside edge of the headland. And the very first pass in the field, it is one 40 foot past of conventional corn. 00:02:51 The very next one that comes in, he's, he's planting and he's got the, um, the four rows in, in the center that puts him the center 00:02:58 Of, you know, he's got 60 foot from the center out to the edge of the field. So it actually, it all works out 00:03:04 and I know that it, it seems like it's complicated and it would be a pain in the butt, but if I'm running two planters anyway on any one farm, 00:03:12 wouldn't it make more sense to do that? And then I can come back in the field. It does multiple other things as well. 00:03:18 We've all talked about the sunlight exposure on the plants. You know, we've all talked about, 00:03:23 we've looked into strip intercropping, we've looked into a bunch of other things. If I can get a little bit more sunlight on the plants 00:03:30 where there's four rows are the short corn, the corn alongside of it, we jumped the population up. You know, we're up to 44,000 on the two side, 00:03:39 on the two rows that are next to that short row corn. 'cause we realize we're gonna get more sunlight on it. Maybe I can overcome the yield deduction on those four rows. 00:03:48 Again, it's only 8% of the field. So it's not that I don't need that big of an increase in order to cover it. 00:03:55 You know, guys in the south deal with heat all the time. Maybe just, maybe it would be a way 00:04:02 that we could get some heat out of that crop. We have that as well. And I do know that that's a pretty big deal. 00:04:08 You know, Johnny and Chad have both done stuff with skip row corn. When you do the skip row corn, one of the reasons 00:04:14 that it works out, it allows that that crop to breathe at nighttime. That so it can respirate we'll get 00:04:20 some of that heat outta the crop. Now I know that, I realize in my situation it's only every 120 foot that I'd be letting some heat outta that crop. 00:04:28 But maybe those four rows that are over there on that one side, maybe it's enough to get a little bit of heat and get a little more airflow through that, through 00:04:37 that crop when it gets big and dense. Especially when we talk about irrigate situations like this farm right here, um, we planted at 39,000 per acre. 00:04:46 The skip row or the, the short corn, it's planted at 42 and then the corn alongside of it's planted at 44. You know, just four rows, you know, two rows on this side 00:04:56 and two rows on the other side. So what we've got going on here, it it, it took a little bit of planner math, you know, to, to get it figured out. 00:05:04 But we got it figured out. And I've got a situation where I think that in the future, I think maybe we have an option to use short row corn, 00:05:13 you know, and make it seem like a quote unquote tram line that we can run our sprayers across all year long. 00:05:20 So we're gonna follow this thing all year long. It's gonna be a neat little setup. I'm gonna get made fun of a lot. 00:05:25 I've already gotten made fun of so far. I had some buddies rode down the road and was like, man, what in the heck did you do 00:05:31 down there on your other farm? And I said, well, uh, you'll see when it comes outta the ground and it, and it starts to look great when it gets a little bigger, 00:05:38 but it's gonna look funny and it's gonna be a whole bunch of up and down, but it's gonna be really easier 00:05:42 for the sprayer guy. Sprayer guy's gonna be out to just look for the short row, turn in at the short row and run. 00:05:49 We'll be back to you soon. 00:05:50.055 --> 00:05:51.405