Smart Fertility Management for Profitable Farming in 2025 and Beyond

00:00:01 All right. Again, welcome to the Nature's Booth here at Commodity Classic 2025, where we are talking about plans, 00:00:06 technologies, adapt adaptations, methods you can use to farm better and more profitably. It's a challenging environment. 00:00:14 Now we know that's the way it is, and I gotta be honest with you, it's probably not gonna change anytime soon. 00:00:19 AG cycles take a while. Our topic is 20, survive and Thrive in 2025 and beyond. We're going to hear from our friend Chad Henderson 00:00:28 from Madison, Alabama. Kevin Matthews from various towns in Western North Carolina, and he has four addresses, I swear. 00:00:34 And then Kelly Garrett from Area Iowa, and then of course, Tommy Roach, our host, uh, here from Natures. 00:00:40 And remember, we also want this to be interactive. If you have a question, if you have an interjection, if there's something you would like 00:00:45 to go deeper on, raise your hand. It's always been about interaction and information here at the Natures Booth. 00:00:51 2025 Survive in 2025. Tommy, you and I came up with this topic, actually you did, and we talked about it. It's not just in 2025, it's always, 00:00:59 but it seems like there's a little bit more, uh, screws getting put to us right now. Open me up here. 00:01:05 So as you can imagine, being a fertilizer company, yes, thank you, Damien. Being a fertilizer company, what people tend to do, 00:01:13 wanna do, and especially a, in a depressed economy, is guess what? Remove nutrition out of their program. 00:01:22 Uh, and that's probably the wrong thing to do. We, we, uh, call it you're not gonna save yourself to prosperity, but, 00:01:31 and these guys are, I'm sure gonna talk about it, but it matters more when you put it down versus taking something out. 00:01:38 And we all, we can all be a whole lot more, uh, efficient than what we do. And I think that's a big part going forward. 00:01:46 Okay, so what's interesting to me is, of all the expenses you have, and I wanna go ahead and go right down line here to Kelly Garrett, you 00:01:51 and I have talked about at your farm. We have historically over applied fertility. Why? 'cause it generally was inexpensive. 00:01:58 'cause we didn't really have great technology. And because it was an insurance policy, if you throw enough fertilizer out there, 00:02:03 you're probably gonna get a yield. Well, right now we're talking about break even margins or even less than that on soybeans. 00:02:08 And we know that from an environmental standpoint, we have over applied. So the first answer is, yeah, we don't need to go ahead 00:02:14 and cut back on all fertility to save it nickel, but we're probably overspending in many cases on fertility as it's 00:02:21 Yes, I really believe that we are. You need to embrace the technology that's out there and really measure what you're putting on. 00:02:28 Measure what the plant needs. Be it a tissue test, be a SAP test. I prefer a SAP test, 00:02:33 but whatever your technology is, look at what's in your soil. Utilize a soil test a year like this year when margins are 00:02:39 tighter, maybe skip your drive p and k, live off the savings account, I call it. That's in your soil. Go 00:02:45 to some variable rate fertility on your nitrogen. Go to some variable rate applications on your seed. Can you turn down your seed sum? 00:02:52 Uh, the last thing I would do though, is not try to balance that plant and supplement that plant 00:02:57 to chase the yum. A lot of times, Uh, The Last thing we'll cut is that dry 00:03:01 PK, In my Opinion, should be the first thing you cut. Uh, Chad, we've done this thing at your farm, and I think it's cool where you said Chad Farms next to, 00:03:11 uh, suburban encroachment. I mean, we say what's gonna be in these fields 10 years from now? 00:03:14 It could be vital houses or, uh, Amazon warehouses. And Chad has an episode of our Cutting the Curve podcast that we recorded, and we talked at great length about this 00:03:24 idea that, oh, I'm gonna keep putting a bunch of stuff out there, putting a bunch of stuff out there to build up the bank. 00:03:29 And the reality is, you have fields that you thought were gonna be developed in the next couple of years. 00:03:34 So you just went to a just in time spoonfeeding approach. You've had that field for seven years 00:03:40 because the Amazon warehouse never came in and you didn't lose bushels and you just kept izing the plant. 00:03:45 And it taught you. I have historically over applied thinking I was gonna get a bonus out of it, and I never got it. 00:03:51 Yeah. You know, um, we, we've got a phrase there around the house. We try to put it on a liquid diet. 00:03:56 And when we say that it may be land that we gonna work one year, you know, a landlord to come in or a housing project come in, 00:04:02 and you know, there's some of those guys, your best friends, you know, they're gonna buy up 200 acres, 00:04:06 they're gonna develop 20 or 30 of it. You just keep working it down to where it's nothing. Well then we'll just put it onto what we call a liquid diet. 00:04:12 And we've learned how to do that, um, through these, you know, I guess a bad thing and try to turn it into a good thing. 00:04:18 But we can't just put dry fertilizer out there. Um, but number one still has gotta be pH you know, when you start that and you're gonna go down that road, 00:04:26 you still have to fix your pH. pH has to be one. Um, correct. And if a pH is correct, you can do whatever you wanna do, 00:04:34 but you have to manage pH first. So when we talk about survive and thrive, and in 2025 beyond, Kevin, 00:04:40 I wanna move the microphone over to you. It's a, and we've covered this, a couple of different things. 00:04:44 With extreme ag, you always think, okay, I gotta cut back on inputs, I gotta cut back on fertility. First off, there's probably places to do that, 00:04:51 as we've already discovered 'cause of over application. But also sometimes we're trying to save ourselves into prosperity. 00:04:57 I want you to speak to where you look at smart cuts versus you're hurting yourself. You're dropping dollars to pick up dimes. 00:05:04 Well, I wanna look at the capability of the farm. We have variable soil tops. Some soils is only going to grow certain bushels. 00:05:10 Others is gonna grow better bushels. We also look at, you know, the field size. We look at the timing of the plants. 00:05:18 When can we put this plant on a liquid diet? We're not worried so much about the acre. And I a hundred percent agree that the pH is something 00:05:26 that we have low phs. It's much easier to address low phs than for Kelly, for instance, has a higher pH in areas. 00:05:34 So it makes it easier for us to do that, but we wanna balance that plant as much as we can and just give it nutrition as we go. 00:05:42 And it was a big thing last year. We hit a drought and with that drought, we didn't have all our eggs in the basket up front. 00:05:48 So that gave us the ability to pump the brakes and quit spending because all we was doing at that one point was helping the insurance company. 00:05:57 Damien, I'm talking, sir, you're supposed to be paying attention Over here. I'm just 00:06:00 gauging to make sure Stuart's not crafting a 14 minute question. But anyway, that's a story for another, 00:06:06 Alright, Or nothing, uh, by the way, pH to the person like me, that's like, okay, uh, I'm A little bit over my head here. 00:06:13 Why is pH so important on my ag on my fertilizer spin, I wanna go to the agronomic extra. So pH helps you, helps you balance nutrition, all pH range 00:06:23 where plants can take up nutrients in a more efficient manner is say around six to six, eight to seven, to, that's the range. 00:06:33 And you're never gonna get 100% of the field that's in that range. But we, we manage it the best we can. 00:06:42 We, we stop spreading dry fertilizer just 'cause that's what we've always done. We know the definition of of insanity. 00:06:51 I think everybody does that. So there's be, there's better ways to skim the cat. And Chad's gonna probably talk about different ways 00:06:58 to skim the cat here in a minute. But that's, that's kind of the down and dirty on the pH thing. 00:07:03 So the point is, if you're talking about surviving and maybe you're saying, I gotta pull back money, you might be spending too much on fertility unnecessarily. 00:07:10 And if you just correct your pH levels, you would be able to cut back on the spend. Am I hearing that right? 00:07:15 And we'll, we'll, I'm, I'm sitting right here to the, not put as much nitrogen keying as people want to, but we're gonna get to that 00:07:23 because the, uh, most common thing that people do to increase yield is put on more nitrogen. Yes, that's correct. And that's the wrong thing to do 00:07:34 because we talk about nutrient balance and that just gets everything outta whack. So by the way, if we're talking about surviving in 2025 00:07:40 and, and smart spend versus silly spend, you've got a thing that we've done on one of our recordings. 00:07:44 There's not just micros and macros. There are how many classifications of and fertility inputs. I say there's four classes at the top, you have nitrogen, 00:07:52 then you've got P and k, maybe sulfur. And then since Chad's here, we have to include boron, we should all, with Chads here, we should always say boron, 00:07:59 iss a macro, but boron would be what I call a maxi micro. And then maybe zinc. You know, everybody's heard of zinc 00:08:05 and boron and then all the other micronutrients that are also important that you haven't heard of, those are the fourth class. 00:08:11 And they're all important. They're all equally important. But that is the way a farm reviews them. 00:08:15 We're gonna talk about surviving in 20, 25, 3 places where you figured out a way to cut expense and not taking it out of crop. Uh, fertility. 00:08:23 Yeah, split apply or ergen use less nitrogen. We're 0.6 pounds per harvest to bushels. Pretty much 0.8. That's the range we wanna be in. 00:08:33 We wanna put that potassium out there at bio. Okay. It's, uh, it's just opened a lot of doors. We don't have to buy as much and put out up front. 00:08:40 We can put it out throughout the trial. Um, You don't like to just survive. You like to thrive. You are, as we call you one 00:08:47 of the send the twins, you and Temple Rhodes never met a product you didn't wanna put out on the field. 00:08:51 It's kind of Clipping your wings when it's like this on these tight environments. Where are you making the adjustment to go ahead 00:08:57 and send it versus pullback? Um, Well, you know, I don't know that we'll have a whole lot of send it, but you know, on that, on that note, you know, 00:09:05 my dad has a saying, you know, he said, if you look, you can, you know, we're talking about save yourself to prosperity, you know, if you plan 00:09:10 for failure, you'll have one. You know, so that's, that's, you know, you still gotta plan to make a crop. 00:09:16 We still need bushels. We still gotta make, make what we need to make, you know, to make ends meet. 00:09:21 So it's just decide what you're gonna do and run with it. You know, I know we're in in some tough economic times right 00:09:26 now, but still there's plenty of replacements here. You know, we went, me and Tommy's done what, three or four years worth of data on replacing liquid with a dry. 00:09:35 And I would say that the biggest bump we've had, I think is 12 bushel. I think it was 12 bushel, right? 00:09:42 Dry with a liquid No replace. Yeah. Replacing with a dry, dry with a liquid. We were the fertilizer institute here 00:09:50 And talk about it. So, So, so, you know, when we replaced that, you know, we was, we see benefits every time, you know, is that 00:09:58 for every acre and every farm? No, it's not. But um, it is, it does, it does have a place, it does have a fit. 00:10:04 And you know, one fit. That's not time. ISS naming products. You know, we've had a couple names on products that we done, 00:10:09 and it's just not, it's not his suit. So when he names all these products, you know, all of 'em you see are his name. So 00:10:15 Wait a minute, what's interesting is you come to this year after year, Tommy is a huge Texas Tech fan. 00:10:19 He loves Texas Tech, particularly Texas tech football. So he names the products that are sports themes, touchdown first down. 00:10:27 And I said, you're a Texas Tech fan. What about fumble? Never appear in a bowl lose by seven touchdowns. Interception the embarrassment of Lubbock. 00:10:37 All right, go back to go back to the other thing I asked Kevin, and I want you to address this. 00:10:42 It's like I, I've, I'm not the farmer. You are the farming experts and you're the agronomic guy. I see people whose household financials are a disaster. 00:10:51 They're absolutely broke and they're dropping money everywhere. But you talk to 'em and they worry about where they buy gas 00:10:58 to save 4 cents per fill up one time a week. I'm like, you're focused on a dollar a week and you're dropping thousands of dollars over here. 00:11:07 That's how I look at fertility. I think that guys like Tommy and all the people here at Nature's get badgered 00:11:13 and banged on, save me a nickel, save me a nickel. And that same operator is dropping dollars somewhere else to save a dime on 00:11:19 fertility. Is that an accurate assessment? Yes, it is. There's a lot of waste in agriculture, uh, because we don't measure and we don't keep track. 00:11:26 The data isn't clean enough and we need to look more at, uh, how little can I get by with how far can I turn down the nitrogen? 00:11:34 Should I be, should I variable rate my seed corn population? I try, I used to plant 35,000 seeds 00:11:40 and I plan about 28 and a half. There's a lot of savings there. Over 20% savings in my sea corn, my yield hasn't gone down. 00:11:46 I've got healthier plants. I would tell you, I believe my yield's gone up a little bit. We by, uh, by measuring what's in the plant, 00:11:52 using the nitrogen, trying to assimilate all that nitrogen, our, our spend has actually gone down. 00:11:57 Worst case scenario, you should try to reallocate dollars. Best case scenario. Try to find, find a way 00:12:02 to bring the dollars out of there. Uh, by the way, you used an example of one of our cutting the curve podcast, Kevin, 00:12:09 about other places to save. You talked about inventory. I mean, I think you can go through the farm and probably find, uh, 00:12:14 a dollar here, a dollar there, a dollar here. And it doesn't have to affect your fertility budget. So if you and Chad wanna kind of kick in here, 00:12:20 where else did you pull a nickel back? Yeah, so that's, that was one of the big things back in the winter. 00:12:26 You know, you look at the commodity prices and you look at the outlook and you wanna see what you can do. 00:12:31 But agronomically, if we start pulling this stuff out of our agronomic budget, it is going to hurt. Overall. We're not going to achieve those yields. 00:12:40 And we need to look at the overall farm. Um, I know Kelly's does a great job with his staff. They look at everything and, and we do that. 00:12:49 You filters, you, you know, we speak of that. We look at, you know, letting that eight hour tractor sit there and run an hour 00:12:56 before the combine gets there with a grain car that cost you a lot of money. And, and once an hour of a tractor of that value, 00:13:02 an hour of it ling is $450,000 tractor costing you about 150 bucks an hour for our tractor to sit there and iron to run. 00:13:09 And it's these little things that bite us that it goes back to control the controllables. 00:13:15 And don't worry about the uncontrollables. We can't worry about the how big a crop we're gonna grow, but we gotta be prepared to grow a great crop. 00:13:24 All right, you're on farms all around America. Go ahead and I got a question for Everybody. Well, so 00:13:28 piggybacking him, so things that we can control. We know when plants, and this is regardless if it's corn, cotton, beans, 00:13:38 potatoes, we know exactly when, uh, said plant is going to require said nutrient and in how much they're gonna require said nutrient except 00:13:48 for a funky thing that we talked about before this. So why not? We, we, we can control those controllers. We know people aren't using enough zinc. 00:14:00 We know people aren't using enough boron. We know people are using too much nitrogen. We know there's nutrients that improve nitrogen utilization 00:14:12 or on potassium, sulfur, copper. We know these things, so why not put 'em in your program and use them? Staying 00:14:20 With Tommy. Okay, go ahead Chad. You Know, I'm talking to two or three people and it really surprised me. 00:14:24 But I've talked to several people, um, here at this show that really don't have a use for using Bora. 00:14:31 You know, it's just, I was this, again, you would, you would think that it would, you know, we're talking about boron, but boron, they 00:14:37 Can't find any. 'cause you used It. I did use my share. That's a fact. That is a fact. We use our sheer 00:14:42 With my agronomy team and the SAP test that we look at across all states, across all crops. 00:14:48 We've never seen one test that's sufficient zinc. That's, that is sufficient. Every sample, every sample you've pulled, 00:14:54 not just on your farm, but also with the company that you work with that covers other farms. Never once have you seen enough zinc, never have, 00:15:01 never has enough zinc. Okay, one time. So that goes to the question, uh, that you covered when we did our warmup. 00:15:09 Believe it or not, we practiced this, uh, the other day and Tommy put up a bunch of slides that went over my head, chemistry wise and agro. 00:15:15 I mean, I still know the periodic symbol of silver. I mean, I still know the periodic symbol of silver miracle. I'm gonna get him the mic again. Oh no, don't do that. 00:15:24 Don't do that. Um, but here's the thing. You talked about, uh, field day that our friend Matt Miles had in Arkansas, 00:15:31 and you had these growers that had more than sufficient potassium, but it wasn't getting into plants. 00:15:37 And their answer was to add more potassium. So can you speak to That? So they, 00:15:40 we talked about how do you chase potassium deficiency because they're, you know, cotton wise, uh, it loves potassium 00:15:49 and invariably you're gonna see deficiency at some point in time. So I asked them, and these were, these were consultants. 00:15:58 How do you chase potassium deficiency? What do you use? And they looked at me cross-eyed and they're like, I didn't, I had no clue. 00:16:07 They said they chase it with, uh, spreading dry potash in season. So does that, does that make sense? 00:16:17 And I don't think it does. So second, um, I talked to a, uh, Colorado old Colorado state researcher, uh, thir, well, 00:16:26 Friday when I got up here, and he's done extensive potassium research across the corn belt. 00:16:32 And he's fixing to summarize this big huge data set that he has. And he made a statement that everybody, 00:16:39 everybody's soil test and everybody takes that soil test and looks at how much PPMK there is, 00:16:48 how accurately does that number reflect yield across the whole corn be for 200 and some odd different data set paints. 00:16:58 How much, Alright, wait, wait, by the way, we want you to be interactive Eon, answer Joel. Uh, not well, It is worse than not. 00:17:07 Well, 25% of the time that accurately reflects final yield. Now, what is base saturation? How much does that affect? 00:17:16 How much does that predict eventual yield? Is it better than 25%? 50%? 50%, 50%. So it's still pretty bad. 00:17:28 So, you know, when we talk about that, if we look at, you know, any of these products we're, we're chasing, you know, whether it's own a dry side 00:17:34 or liquid side or whatever. I just hadn't found a way on our farm yet that you could treat anything with one source. 00:17:40 You know, I mean, we're, we're looking at, you know, every time we go across the field, you know, and, and beans or with fungicide, we're gonna have a gallon of bio. 00:17:47 Can, you know, I mean, it's just, when you're talking about, what is it, three pounds to the gallon? 00:17:52 I guess it would be two and a half, two and a half, three pounds of the gallons is what you're getting out. 00:17:55 But it's a hundred percent use and it's a hundred percent now, you know, it's in the plant now. 00:18:00 So, you know, those are byproducts. Same way with boil line. You know what we're gonna use then? 00:18:05 By the way, remember any questions at all? Even the people back there standing, if you have a question, we want hear from you, we want this. 00:18:09 Be as interactive as possible. Jordan Burko, I know you have a question. You're back there saying, I would like 00:18:14 to actually try and put them on the spot. You can't do that. These guys know too much. All right. That's not true. Anybody got a question? 00:18:19 Anybody would like to have a question? We want this to be as interactive as possible. No. All right. I've got, oh, what? Hang on a second, my 00:18:25 Man. Spencer, Wait a minute. I'm not gonna give it to him. Don't worry. Damian's nervous. I'm gonna get Stuart tonight. Um, so I, I do a lot 00:18:33 of economic research, so I'm big on the, I'm big on the finances. So I'm wondering, we've obviously seen over the past several 00:18:40 years, input costs per acre and on farm total have risen drastically. I'm wondering, with the solutions that y'all are proposing 00:18:47 with trying to eliminate waste in every part of the growing process and trying to use your inputs more wisely, do you think 00:18:56 that this could possibly result in over time your input costs remaining relatively constant per acre if you cut down on cost enough each year and user nutrients more wisely? 00:19:07 Chad? Yeah, if we can get Tommy, he'd sell it, sell it at the same cost, we'd be locked in spin. Go ahead. Address that. Yeah, I do believe at some point 00:19:18 that mean we will find where we should be. You know, like what, how low can we go? Where should we be at? But 00:19:25 I think we're a long way from there. I think that's a great question. It it requires more research, things like that. 00:19:30 The weather is going to dictate some of that, you know, uh, if I have better weather in the Midwest with my soil, 00:19:35 the biological system's gonna provide more or less in a drier year. The potassium's not gonna come up through that plant. 00:19:41 I might have to supplement or biocare, things like that. So there's still gonna be some variables based 00:19:46 on weather, things like that. Uh, you know, as well as I do Spencer, that harm's like golf and no two shots are the same. 00:19:52 It's like gambling. Yes. Yes. It's like gambling with golf. How's that? But yeah, we, we have a long way 00:19:57 that we can dial it down and become more efficient. The moron method doesn't work anymore. You cannot just continue to put more on 00:20:03 It, right? Yeah. When you look at the economics of it, especially, one thing that we've noticed more than anything, 00:20:09 if I look from when I started farming to today, my equipment cost, which used to be down much low, is always land, was first, fertility, seed crop protection. 00:20:20 And now land's still a big one. But my equipment cost is unbelievable. When you look at a hundred 00:20:27 and uh, 250 horsepower tractor, I bought a 84 30 brand new, give $148,000 for it. 00:20:34 That same tractor today is $400,000. And you gotta figure out your cost per acre. This equipment cost is enormous. 00:20:43 The fertility costs, you know, I paid $70 a ton for nitrogen. I paid 300, $400 a ton. We're about down nowhere near that. 00:20:53 So it's kind of a variable. It chases things. But this equipment cost is, well, every year I've been farming, it has never went down. 00:21:00 In 1998, my first combine cost 60,000 Last month my, somebody used to pick up for 60,000, right? Okay. Um, and back when I was a kid, Coke was a dime. 00:21:09 All right? So anyway, I started starting to sound like, oh, guys, how far did you have to walk 00:21:14 to school through blizzards? All right, let's, let's move on to thrive. When you go out to a farm 00:21:18 and they say, Hey, you know what, I think my costs are right? I got my costs of production. 00:21:21 I'm below, I'm below my revenue, I'm, I'm gonna be okay, but I wanna really swing for the fences on some acres. 00:21:28 What do you tell 'em? And in 2025, what do you say? All right, you wanna thrive on this? You wanna swing for the fences? Try this. 00:21:35 I would say take avail, take advantage of available tank space. We're not the things we're talking about, whether it's 00:21:44 over here on the side amongst up, up here. We're not talking about making extra passes across the field. 00:21:50 It's taking advantage of tank space that you could put nutrition in you. Uh, it makes no sense to make an extra pass typically. 00:21:59 So why not put, um, you know, some z moron in your fungicide pass early post or early deep pre-task, uh, beans. 00:22:12 Don't just plant 'em and go on vacation like people used to. It is not a cover crop to get to next year's corn crop. 00:22:21 And just quickly talking about waste, you know, he said he cut his, uh, corn population down. How many people still plant a whole buttload 00:22:31 of beans bean population? And do you think it is way too much? And that's a whole nother topic 00:22:38 for, we'll have another second. Alright, Let's go right into bean. Let's go into bean population. 00:22:42 'cause one of the first things I learned when I joined XT Extreme Ag to be their host here three 00:22:46 and a half years ago, was that you did soybean population trials. And you said, we would've turned it down lower on part 00:22:51 of our plots, but the planter wouldn't let me go any lower. And you did from 32,000 to 64,000 00:22:57 to 180,000, I think is what it went. Yes, we, uh, we planted 30, 60, 91 20 and 180 00:23:07 and, uh, for all from Your dad's Driveway, the mistake I made to 30,000 was across my dad's driveway. 00:23:12 And they, the planter wouldn't even go all the way down to 30,000. We only go down to 34,000. 00:23:17 And we came back the, uh, the 90,000 beat to 60,000 on the soybean population by a bushel or soap, like less than two bushel. 00:23:25 But the 60,000 was actually more profitable because of the seed savings. But the amazing thing was that most people in my area, 00:23:32 I think a lot of farmers plant 180,000 seeds. The 32,000 seats beat to 180,000 seats by three bushel. How much are we talking about saving right there? 00:23:41 I don't buy soybeans. If we go, if we go, if we cut our soybean population by even half and we don't, and we don't really give up hardly 00:23:47 any yield, how much food you save It, it would be high. What, what we, what we got on a bag of beans. 00:23:54 Let's say it's, let's say it's $65 on a bag of tree beans, right? At $65 at $140,065. 00:24:01 So then if we're looking at what, a third of that, So 25, 30 bucks. Yeah. So you can take 25 or $30 off of your acre. 00:24:08 No, not off. That's the cost. I mean, you take, take 40 bucks an acre off, Okay? You can do 00:24:12 40 bucks just by changing your population. Who's willing to do that? Lauren, you should be, it's easier for me to say it's your farm, not mine. 00:24:21 All right, what's the survive strategy? That one. I'm sorry. What's a thrive strategy? What's something you're gonna do? 00:24:26 You're like, you know what, I'm gonna swing for the fences on at least my best acres, or I'm gonna do something different. 00:24:30 Gimme a thrive. So for two years now, we've been adding a extra core of zinc on top of what we was already putting out. 00:24:38 I had no idea that Kelly had that information that he just shared. But I will tell you, we're picking up about four 00:24:44 to six bushels on average on our corn. I thought we was putting enough zinc out with our micro pack. 00:24:50 I am not. I need more zinc to feed that microbial activity to feed those microbes on that soil. 00:24:56 And, uh, it, it's been proven two years in a row and plot that and it'll be across our whole farm. So Zinc, zinc increase is where you're gonna actually push it 00:25:04 and you think it's gonna help you thrive. And you've, and you've never in infer, in furrow, you're gonna put zinc in furrow on every anchor 00:25:11 Corn, anchor Corn, every corn anchor. Got it. Anybody got any questions? Anybody got any questions that we can help you with? 00:25:16 Because we wanna make this internet as possible. Mr. Greg Dell. Oh, you talked about how there's no correlation between 00:25:25 potassium, potassium numbers as far as per million and yield. Yep. How about, uh, actually Brian 00:25:33 and Darren Hefty just talked about how about the correlation between, um, balances and yield as far as, uh, like, 00:25:41 and ratios like, uh, magnesium, potassium or things like that. Where do you see that balance playing in the future 00:25:48 for being more efficient? So another, another level beyond base saturation was K to mag ratio. Now what trumps everything? 00:25:59 What would you think trump's everything that we, that I just talked about? Moisture stress. Because what he just said 00:26:08 that potassium's not gonna translocate up through the plant during moisture stress. 00:26:13 You can just take everything off the tank. Anybody else got anything? Anybody else up here? Have anything? Anybody out here got a question? 00:26:22 All right, moving forward. Moving forward. Here's the reality. Uh, this is not a one year blip. Generally, agricultural cycles hang around for a while. 00:26:31 I could make the case that this is where we are. This is the new normal, as we might say. The time to keep making these adjustments is now. 00:26:38 So what adjustments are you gonna keep looking at? Maybe not even this year, but you're kind of eyeing and Considering trialing this year for the years to come. 00:26:46 Chad, Kevin, anybody? Yeah. So we, when we met with Tommy the other day, and uh, we get a little try to get some, we learned, try 00:26:57 to learn from these guys more and more. One thing that he showed us, I knew it, but I had not seen it on paper to really understand it. 00:27:05 How many of you all have used oh oh 60? I know I've used a lot of it over the years of that pound or of 10 pounds of oh oh 60 elemental pounds. 00:27:19 How much of it do you think is available to that plant that year? Two pounds. Pretty close. One, one pound. 00:27:30 One one pound. Basically that's it. Now if you go with a Kay acetate with the bio kay technology, how much 00:27:41 on 10 pounds of actual elemental potassium do you think is available to that plant that first year? 00:27:51 Well, actually immediately, all of all of all, all of em. Especially cost. Yeah. 00:27:57 Worst money spent in agriculture's dry p and k and Dale, the worst money spent is, so You tell me we we're gonna do this year, you know, 00:28:06 and we've been doing this for a while, but we'll just keep banding, fertilizing, you know, we just gotta keep getting into the base of that plan. 00:28:12 We gotta keep using the, you know, the right amount and not overdoing it, but just keeping everything at the base, whether it's 00:28:18 through a wide drop or two to two or whatever application you got. We just the days of spreading and, and just broadcasting. 00:28:25 Unless you're dealing with something like this where we're spraying with a herbicide or failure deal, you know, where we can add product in then, 00:28:31 but the load, the bulk load has gotta be in that band. We've gotta keep that band up. Chad and Stewart have a 00:28:37 field that they thought they were gonna lose. They put it on the liquid diet. They keep taking, uh, 00:28:41 the soil test says for like seven years. Soil test never changed. What's that tell you about dry fertilizer? 00:28:47 The soil test didn't go down. We're removed. We've always heard all about this removal and things like that, but soil test never changed. 00:28:52 So that, what did you remove The last year? Yeah, we run, it was wheat and beans and corn. 00:28:56 I think it was five years when we started, I think it was wheat and beans and corn. And we run it on in last year we, we pulled samples again 00:29:02 and it was like, like nothing like it was, you know, sideways on the sample. And when we done that the last year on just the inputs, 00:29:10 now just on the inputs, we made a, this is the best I've ever done. I made 175 bushel corn on the $175. 00:29:18 The two biggest things I've ever learned from extre ag is that right there with the soil test not changing. 00:29:22 And then everybody in here would like to raise 400 bushel corn. But why haven't you ever put on a 400 bushel blend 00:29:28 of dry fertilizer? A 400 bushel removal? Why have you not done that? Because it's because it doesn't work. It is up. Chad did it. 00:29:35 Chad did it. Okay. Turn the ground white. Did it from light pole to light. Well, Chad did it. It's the greatest thing 00:29:40 I've ever heard of. And Anyone out there's been There 10 years, never have picked it up on the yield monitor. 00:29:46 What's it doing for you or on a, or on a yield monitor When you picked it up on the SOL test, like we ain't picked it up at all. 00:29:52 Change again. What are you doing? It was one of the things Stuart said. You sure like that? Dang, you know, 'cause it was, Stewart picked it up. 00:30:00 What he paid for it when Stuart paid for it, he picked it up on note. But no, we had like, we took, we took a spreader 00:30:06 and we made it to like, where does it have to go to on a bearable rate? Where does it have to go on this field to keep spreading? 00:30:13 Okay, that was 850 bushel yield going to make it. I said, I don't want it to shut off. Like I don't wanna spreader shut off. 00:30:20 And we just spray like this thing is on. You can hold your finger up like it is blowing dry lines out the back. 00:30:24 Greg look like it snow in Ville, Alabama. I don't know why he asked me for a budget on this stuff. It's just make you feel better. I can. 00:30:31 So Ster Creek, the greenest research of all time no fertilizer soil test doesn't change. 850 bushel yield goal. Soil test doesn't change. 00:30:40 Tell me what those products are doing for you. I hate to point this out because I'm sure there's some dry fertilizer people in this building right now, 00:30:46 but they're not hiring us to be in their booth. So, you know what? That's the way it works. I'm The kit for farmers not dry fertilizer 00:30:51 Salesman. I apologize if it's Having, I wanna go over here With my friend Jeff. I wanna go to my friend Alan. 00:30:55 You are an agricultural retailer. You're in an area that, uh, Delmarva Peninsula, a lot of scrutiny on nutrients. 00:31:01 What do you think? And nobody's gonna blame you. What mistakes? One or two very common mistakes easily fixable 00:31:08 that you see on farms in all of your geography or anywhere. You're like, man, 00:31:12 you're really making mistakes. That's cost costing money. Well, not using an air company 00:31:15 'cause we're a hundred percent liquid fertilizer company as you started, man, but, uh, over, 00:31:20 So all, all the other three farmers from Del Marva in the building will have to come and look you up. But anyway, 00:31:26 Uh, temple uses air fertilizer from time to time. So yeah, you gonna ask him, man, uh, just On his good, just on his good field. Yeah, 00:31:32 It's overlying this this year. So Overly the biggest mistake you think is over application And, and placement, you know, 00:31:39 but okay, we're getting to the narrow bands. Everything's liquid banding, furation. Now we're really tightening up. 00:31:45 What do you think farmers have done a really, really good job of just in the last few years? And you're like, man, 00:31:51 20 years ago we should been doing this because look at the return. Uh, you guys kinda hit it on already seed population, 00:31:56 you know, 10 years ago it was 50,000 seeds, more corn, more corn, more corn. But it was, it was totally backwards. So what you should be, 00:32:03 Yeah, there's a couple of seed companies here that don't like us to say that. Uh, but anyway, uh, but we're not in their booth. 00:32:08 We're not in their booth right now as it is. Chad, do you have any Kelly, Johnny? Uh, Tommy, what do you got? 00:32:14 All right. Um, Mistakes that you see when you're out in the countryside. You cover the entire North America. 00:32:18 What do you see that you're like, So How about, how about we go to what, what we're gonna do to thrive? 00:32:23 Okay, thrive. All right. So, uh, it is, it's my job to I guess sort through all these different companies, different biologicals 00:32:32 and whatever that they come through the booth and want me to test and it takes me a while to go through it. 00:32:38 But time and time again, it goes back to basic nutrition. They, they do all the, they do all this testing with water 00:32:48 as the carrier or some cheap, 10 34 oh as the carrier. But once you put it in soluble available nutrition, like nature's has, most of 'em don't show up. 00:33:03 I mean, 95% of the time it's throw in the trash. So yes, I'm gonna continue to look for the next new ingredient. 00:33:10 I mean, just like Moneyball, we, we launched Moneyball last year at Commodity Classic. So it took me, and that's a good name. Moneyball is a good 00:33:19 Name. I don't know if you might have a trademark problem trying to take a famous movie and make it into a fertility product, 00:33:24 but I'm just, I'm not, I'm not a patent attorney. I'm not a patent attorney would be a triage question anyway. 00:33:30 So after the first year of using Moneyball, it is very simply stated when to use it because it's got ingredients that enhance that. 00:33:40 We talked about nitrogen use efficiency, we're gonna pull back nitrogen. Why don't we add nutrition 00:33:46 that enhances nutrient efficiency. Agree. That agrees what we're Gonna do. Agree. I agree with that. 00:33:51 Uh, by the way, he talked about biggest mistake. Now we're talking about thrive. Either makes mistake you see or thrive. Gimme one Kevin. 00:33:59 I have to, I mean the mistakes, I a hundred percent agree. I mean, uh, the low populations is 00:34:04 what's kept us in business. I mean, Jim, he plants the soybeans sitting there and we just keep cutting it down 00:34:10 and we manage our population, we manage our maturities by summer solstice and plant date and maturity. We're very a**l about that on our soybeans, 00:34:19 just like we are on the corn. And I see so many people that don't treat their soybeans like corn and it has got to be the very detailed put into it 00:34:28 and the reward is extremely good. Alright, Stewart has a question and remember questions in the question mark? 00:34:37 Yes. Otherwise it's a statement. Okay, so y'all hit on something there. You're talking about nutrients get over applied all the time 00:34:47 across the board, across all facets of agriculture. There's data there. Y'all talking about data that supports not doing that. Okay? 00:34:55 There's data that supports doing what you're doing. Okay? So for all that it can be overwhelming, 00:35:03 the big learning curve about how y'all are managing that data on your phone. So for someone who it may be just a too much 00:35:10 of a donning task to go deep into the devil, those details, is it better to hire somebody 00:35:18 on your farm if you've never had an agronomist? Is there Kelly, you're big on ROI, is it an ROI on that to get some serious in-house help 00:35:25 to show you right in your face, in your farm office that this is the data. I mean, where, where is the starting point 00:35:32 to get someone off the over application to the microbe management that All y'all are doing? 00:35:40 You hire somebody to do your legal work, you hire somebody to do your accounting work, 00:35:44 you hire somebody to do your medical work. And yet, yet, we talked about how much money we're investing inputs like that. 00:35:48 And we don't hire someone to do our aroy. And I apologize, I'll make fun of Tommy here. Uh, Tommy's great, but Tommy's selling you MPK. 00:35:57 I'm gonna hire somebody that looks out for my best interest, not an NPK salesman. 00:36:02 I, I believe that everyone should do that. Just like you're hiring an accountant, you don't have the IRS come and do your taxes. 00:36:07 You hire an accountant to do 'em for you. Hire an agronomist that knows your soils and works with you in a detailed fashion. 00:36:13 That'll, there'll be an ROI on that, just like there is your CPA. All right, we're gonna be, uh, putting a, putting this, 00:36:19 uh, putting a wrap on this here a few minutes. Any questions? Yeah. And, and yeah, well, I was going to, I was gonna say 00:36:26 using an agronomist, not a sales agronomist, there's a big difference. And that basically is a hundred percent what Kelly say. And 00:36:34 Make sure that your agronomist is in line with what you're trying to do for the farm. You know, I mean, there's different agronomists out there 00:36:39 that have different visions than what we have sometime. And, and that's not saying that you're wrong or you're, you're wrong, 00:36:45 but just make sure that their goals and your goals line. We have one, you know, on our farm that helps us, 00:36:50 helps me distinguish between products. You know, we get a lot of products coming in here like, well, this is the same as this, this is the same as this. 00:36:57 You know, because we've gotta know what we're testing and what we're not. But just make sure that your goals 00:37:01 and your, you know, just don't hire any agronomists. Make sure y'all go y'all's goals align for what you're looking out for for the five year plan. 00:37:08 You know, Stuart's talking about gathering the data and make sure everybody's on the right track. And obviously the agronomist doesn't have to be on staff. 00:37:13 Obviously there's all kinds of consulting agronomists and, and all that. Alright, well I'm not a, I'm 00:37:17 Not a salesman. No, I mean, I lean on Tommy. I leaned on Tommy about what? About every week coming me? 00:37:22 So, and, and going back to, you have to do it on a local level, on, on what works on your farm. Because this guy right here, we had, 00:37:31 we had a con a conversation before this and everything makes absolute agronomic sense except it was on his farm and it was totally back. 00:37:42 So you got to know your, you gotta know everything about your farm. Rick Torque. 00:37:48 I don't know. Is he saying that you're backwards? I'm not sure what I understood there. Joel, do you you have a rebuttal of that? 00:37:53 Uh, I live, live in farm in a very different area from all you guys. The farm's at 4,000 feet. We fight June 20th Frost. 00:38:02 I have 1800 GDS to work with. Some things that work. Uh, I think it's just know your environment. Take the core, the core principles of the core principles. 00:38:14 But you gotta find what works in your area on your farm. And I hate to sound like my farm's different, 00:38:20 but it appeared that way. Get me outta here on this. We said survive and Thrive and beyond in 2025. 00:38:27 This is a big topic. We're gonna be talking about this at next year's commodity classic, 00:38:31 the year after that, year after that. Because I, Let's, let's, I'm not seeing something. I think this is going to be a, a slug 00:38:38 for the next several years in agriculture. I, I would say just be more, uh, be more cautious of how you apply nutrients. 00:38:47 Not just nitrogen, but nutrients in general. Uh, use the principles of the four R rate, time, place, source. 00:38:55 Um, and that, that's, that is the basic. It's gonna vary by y'all's farm, but those are the basic principles. 00:39:04 Chad, you're gonna be here a while. What do you think? Closing statement? Uh, you know, I'm with Tommy on that. 00:39:11 You know, just, just do what's best for your farm. Make sure, like I said, we we're real efficient on what we do, the products we use, you know, 00:39:19 make sure they're readily available. We don't really have time right now to, to throw something out there on putting it, you know, we, 00:39:24 we can't bank right now, guys. We gotta pull that out at night. All right, then going to Chad and 00:39:28 Kelly, I'm gonna change up the question. We generally move up on our yield trend by about a bushel and a half to two bushel a bushel, 00:39:36 let's say on soybeans every year about two to four bushels on corn every year. In an environment like this, do we finally stagnate? 00:39:44 Do we stay at 52 bushels as our national average and 174? Because farmers are looking at pulling back. 00:39:52 Boy, you gotta decide if you're A-U-S-D-A employee print or point to a yield you've never got. 00:39:58 Or if it's reality and you look at what you can actually produce. But you know, these trendline yields are a joke. 00:40:03 We just keep pushing the trendline yield up and say that's the supply we're going to have. But we don't hit that goal. So, uh, you know, I 00:40:12 You think yields are gonna sta you think that we're gonna see farmers pulling back and we're going to stagnate. 00:40:17 Are we gonna stagnate? Are we gonna stagnate on yield climate because of pulling back? You tell me what the weather is 00:40:23 and I can tell you what the yields are going. Are We gonna pull back on our yield averages because farmers are gonna pull back on inputs? Yes. 00:40:30 I believe the next couple years Will pull back a little bit. We'll actually be po positive for prices. 00:40:34 It should be a little bit bullish. Yes. Got it. Tommy Roach, the agronomic expert with nature's, he's been to my farm. 00:40:41 The grain ring, by the way, I encourage you to check it out. Extreme Ag Farm or the Extreme AGA YouTube channel. 00:40:46 It's a lot of fun. He's been there. We sit down at my greenery and we talk about stuff with the extreme ag guys 00:40:51 that impacts all farmers. All these guys have been there. Look for future episodes that releases every Tuesday. 00:40:56 Kelly Garrett, Kevin Matthews, Chad Henderson. We're gonna stick around here for a little while. Obviously Extreme ag is all about a learning platform 00:41:03 and part of that learning happens, as we all know, over a cocktail. So come up and have a drink, shake hands. 1047 00:41:07.855 --> 00:41:09.595