When Your Soil Is Working Against You: Todd Kimbrell's Fix for Extreme Calcareous Ground

00:00:00 Todd Kimbrell, Central Texas. Got Tommy Roach here. We're just talking about soil tests, and usually people get a kick out of my soil tests. They 00:00:10 usually tell me to repeat the answer. So I'll just give you a rundown on what we're dealing with here. So we're high calcareous soil, so our base sats 00:00:20 on calcium are 94, 95%. So most people can't fathom that and think I misspoke when I tell them. 00:00:28 When he told me that, I said, "Do what now?" Yeah. And then our CECs, the lowest CECs we have are probably 25. We'll go all the way up to, some will get up to 60 on 00:00:38 measured, I mean on calculated- Yeah ... not measured. But yeah, and then high pH, seven, eight to 8.2 in places, so it's a challenge. How do we deal with it? How did we deal with it in the past? 00:00:51 I can tell you, everybody put out dry, dry everything. But there was a big shift to liquid here, and in my opinion, liquid banding is the answer. 00:01:00 So that's kind of where we've ended up here. So I would say there's very few places in the US that a grower 00:01:12 could say, "I've got perfect base saturation." It's very rare. 00:01:18 Typical grower, calcium's not perfect, mag's not perfect, potassium's not perfect. 00:01:25 And historically, the way to deal with any issues with base saturation is putting on potash, K mag, gyps, lime. 00:01:38 Those are the ways that you deal in correcting base saturations. One problem is 00:01:46 it takes a long time to do it, and it's costly. So what do we do until we can get on a program 00:01:57 to adjust base saturations? What do we do until then? We've got to feed the plant. Because you can't just wait five years until you get your bulk 00:02:09 soil fixed. You grow a crop every year. You got to feed the plant. And it doesn't matter if it's putting something as 00:02:20 easy as, say, a calcium EDTA or a mag EDTA in the furrow, but there's better mousetraps. And I think what 00:02:31 we've come up with this year at Nature's, using calcium acetate, mag acetate, potassium acetate. Because we can put those safely, 00:02:43 we can foliar them, soil apply them, in furrow, and fix that small rhizosphere, address that, so we can grow the plant this season. 00:02:57 Yeah, exactly. And the more we put any of those products in that root zone or foliar, but the more in the root zone we are, the better we are with them. I guess what I've learned is 00:03:08 trying to actually change the soil permanently is, I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's next to impossible. It's- 00:03:17 It's what I've inherited. It's what Mother Nature gave us. Right. 00:03:21 So I'm just trying to work, how can we work with it instead of against it? And the more I focus on putting those 00:03:29 nutrients in that root zone, I hate to use banding, but that's the truth. Right. 00:03:34 But putting it in that root zone or foliar, working more foliars now, which we haven't in the past. But the more we can get it efficiently into the 00:03:42 plant or into the root zone, the better off we are than trying to broad spec, change the soil, 00:03:50 so to speak. Right. And there's benefits to be had, of course, calcium, mag, potassium wise. But what people don't understand is that there's 00:04:01 also a benefit to be had with the acetate portion because you're at the bottom of the food chain as far as basic carbon molecule 00:04:13 that plant can utilize, that soil biology can utilize. They don't have to spend any energy to break it into the simple form. It's already there, ready 00:04:25 to be utilized. Yeah. That's efficiency again. So the more efficient, the more we get it straight into the plant without having to go... 00:04:36 Our soil is really bad about tying up things, so the dry, going back to the dry thing. 00:04:41 The joke is throwing out DAP or potash, it's tied up before the spreader gets out in the field. 00:04:47 Right. So, what good did that do us? Probably not much in the long run. Maybe a little bit, but probably not much. 00:04:53 So the more we can allocate those dollars to something that'll go right into the plant more efficiently, the 00:05:01 better off we are down the road. So in your scenario, you're high calcium. That's right. 00:05:08 So the two things that we've done with your planter program- Mm-hmm 00:05:13 ... we used mag acetate plus potassium acetate. Potassium, yep. And then we're going to do the same thing at wide drop, put 00:05:22 more mag acetate out there, more potassium acetate out there, and try to feed the plant because it needs both of those nutrients. 00:05:32 Because with- Yeah ... your calcium-based saturations- Yeah ... it is suffering for mag and potassium. 00:05:39 Yeah, and it's evident during the growing season. We get to the end, and I know that's an issue we've always fought, but we just didn't really know how to fight it, so. 00:05:47 Because you're going to, if you watch more of these episodes that we're talking about here, Chad's got an issue. Matt's got an issue. 00:05:58 There's all these people that I'm doing videos with. They each have their own issue, but we're addressing it with application of different acetate nutrients- 00:06:09 Yes 00:06:09.500 --> 00:06:10.540