Boosting Cotton Yields: Stimulating Microbes at the Pinhead Square Stage

00:00 One of the critical stages in cotton is, uh, what we call Pined Square, and that's when we get our first square on there, 00:05 which will eventually be a bowl if it don't rot off. But Pined Square is one a lot of things. You know, the cotton plant triggers a lot 00:11 of things it needs, whether it's a plant bug application or, uh, in this instance where we're gonna talk about today, 00:16 a source from Sound Ag. Uh, you know, some fertility goes on at that point, you know, that's the, the first square is where, 00:24 where this plant start getting everything they need. And that's when we get so repetitive on things we have to do. 00:28 Last year, uh, we've been testing, uh, source from Sound Ag now for a couple of years. Last year we had it in cotton 00:35 and, uh, one of the last trials we did, it was on one of the worst fields that we have, and it was triple, triple digit, uh, yield increase on that. 00:44 So this year we've increased from a 40 acre plot to a 500 acre block farm, you know, a block of farm. We traditionally think we're seeing 00:51 that it does better on the, I would say, the poor ground. You know, poor ground always struggles more 00:58 and needs more things to happen in the plant. So, you know, what we've seen so far, that's where we think the best fit is for it. 01:03 You know, when I talk about it being on poor ground, we seem to be able to increase yields more on our, 01:08 on our lower quality ground than we do our higher quality ground. This farm that we had it on last year was a farm 01:14 that we'd only had three years. So we've took several additional acres this year, and so we're placing this product on those acres. 01:21 They haven't been getting the multiple use of chicken Litter source is a, is a source of biology. And what it is actually is, it's a, 01:28 it's, it's a feed source. It kind of puts the, the microbes that you have in the soil kind of puts 'em on caffeine. 01:34 So, you know, it basically goes down there. It's a real easy application. It's a one ounce rate. We need biology on these new farms. 01:41 You know, there's always a problem, there's always a solution. Our solution is these new farms 01:45 that haven't had multiple years of litter, they don't have the biology on it that we have on some of our other fields. 01:50 So we feel like this source product will give us a jump. Like I said, last year we had a triple digit yield 01:55 gain out of the cotton. What we're concentrating on now is our cotton. Two things that I really like 01:59 and really intrigued with as, as far as the source product. Number one, it's a easy use rate. 02:04 It's a one ounce rate, piggybacked it pinhead square with something else we're doing. We're always gonna be putting out some type of ate fin, 02:12 something like that to get those initial numbers of plant bugs down as we start first square. So having that one ounce rate, you know, 02:19 we're putting 83 ounces I think in our, in our sprayer right now, which, you know, you don't have to carry a lot of product, a lot 02:24 of totes on the trailer to be able to do this. You can piggyback it with other applications so it's not an extra application that's costing you 5, 6, 7, 02:32 $7 an acre for a tractor to run across air sprayer. And number three is this biology. And that's something that we're learning that, you know, 02:38 we really wanna take advantage of. We're not, we don't do a lot of cover crops, we don't do a lot of no-till, you know, we're trying 02:45 to implement in that end. You know, we destroy a lot of our biology. So when we can have a product like this that comes in 02:50 and helps us take the biology we have and rebuild it and, you know, utilize the, the nitrogen and the phosphorus that it makes available to the plant, 02:58 we're really, really happy with that. Like I said, we had triple digit yield gains last year. Uh, we're actually putting it out today with a sprayer 03:05 and hopefully we'll see some of those, you know, yield increases. Again, we went from a 40 acre plot to 500 acres. 03:11 If we see the results this year that we've seen last year, you know, this will eventually become a 03:15 grower standard practice. So y'all follow us through the season on this, on this. I know there's a lot of companies out there 03:21 and they're always promising that, you know, that these biology can do different things. The first two or three years I used biology, 03:27 I was killing it when I got into the tank with chlorine from my city water. So we've gotta learn to use these products 03:32 and learn to use 'em, right? And I think last year we got the source done right and, um, you know, it paid dividend. 03:37 So hopefully, you know, that'll work. Now we're putting this out as a piggyback application with our, uh, vid eight 03:43 and we're putting a, uh, pint of cowboy and the source is going out with that and a little bit of fertilizer on top of that. 03:49 So Pinhead squares a critical time in the, in the cottons mobility to be able to take up nutrients 03:55 and be able to further, you know, further that on into, to yield. So hopefully this will give us a shot in the arm 04:00 and it'll make a difference.