💧 How Water Quality Impacts Your Crops | XtremeAg at Commodity Classic 2025

00:00:00 Water quality. How important is it? It's very important. We're gonna dig into that topic with Kelly Garrett 00:00:04 and Kurt Grimm of Nutri Drip here at Commodity Classic 2025. Alright. Besides standing with the two best dressed men 00:00:10 that are on this floor at Commodity Classic, you want to talk about something else? First off, you wanna talk about our apparel? That's fine. 00:00:15 But we get so many compliments. We've gotta finally get to the point here. We know we're good looking. Yes, obviously, 00:00:21 but I'm coming up here and I'm having myself a Coca-Cola and you said, you know what? I was gonna use that as an example. Give us the example. 00:00:26 And by the way, I'm not gonna change my ways. So Think about what's in that Coke. Our bodies have the ability, 00:00:31 when we take something into our bodies that aren't good for us, we have the ability to process it out in 24 hours. It's gone. Plants do not have that ability. 00:00:38 And so when we, when we irrigate, if we have bad quality water that's causing the system to go into a dysfunction, we've got, we've got things 00:00:47 that are blocking the flow of, of things in the plant and in the soil. The plants don't have the ability to do what our bodies do. 00:00:55 I was bothered that the, my, one of my favorite beverages of Coca-Cola. You said something bad for you. 00:00:59 Do you realize this is half the reason I'm as intelligent as I am And It makes you functional, doesn't it? 00:01:06 There's a lot to this. There is, um, you know, we got our liver and we got our kidneys, we all that stuff. 00:01:12 Filtration systems. The other thing is, it's probably not going to squash our development. We've got 80 or 90 years 00:01:19 a plant has from the time it's a seed until you harvest it. So there's a lot less time for it to get through. 00:01:24 Somehow the setback, that dirty water we give it, right? Yep. So this, when you think about the things 00:01:30 that are causing problems, we've got bicarbonates, we've got sodium, we've got chloride. All of those things are, 00:01:36 are messing up the balance in the soil and in the plant. They make the soil tight, they make nutrients get tied up. 00:01:43 And so most farmers don't think about the impact of water and what water's doing to our soil and to our plants. 00:01:49 It's the largest fertilizer input that we have that we put out in a single year. Covered this a number of times with you 00:01:55 and it's worth repeating on repeat. Yes. It feels right behind your shop as the favorite one where you said we were throwing water out here. 00:02:02 'cause we thought that was the problem. It turns out the water we were using was too, 00:02:05 too high. Calcium, I think it is Bicarbonates calcium is a component of it. I would say that the bicarbonates are a problem. Yeah. 00:02:11 I've never met anybody with good well water and I, I've got 370 acres of nutri drip irrigation. Half of it is surface water supplied half 00:02:19 of it's well water supplied the surface water yields. We still do great things on. Yeah. Won two NCGA awards this year. Both on surface water. Yeah. 00:02:26 Neither one on well water. And then we get to talking to people, Johnny Rell, Chad Henderson. 00:02:31 You talk to people around the country. I've never met anybody with good well water and your soil takes on the properties of your water. 00:02:38 The fertility in the field between my shop and my house is unparalleled. Yeah. The water problem is unparalleled 00:02:44 and that fertility's tied up. Kurt Does it counter to, uh, first off, you're not saying the well water is bad. 00:02:50 It's not tainted, it's not poisonous. It's just that it's counter to what you would think. I saw one of his ponds that he irrigates out of. 00:02:57 He's got algae and duckweed it. You're like, oh, there's probably all kinds of sediment. That's not the problem. The problem is the well has all 00:03:04 those minerals that come Soluble. Yeah. Right. They're soluble things. Things that are dissolved in the water that you can't see. 00:03:09 Just like you dump salt in a cup of water, you can't see it, but you can sure. Taste it. And now those are the type of things 00:03:14 and some wells do actually have sodium in them, but usually it's things like bicarbonate, things that you wouldn't even taste, um, 00:03:21 that are causing the problem. What's the answer? My agronomy team at home is working with Curt, uh, my agronomy team. You can't get 00:03:28 Bottles of distilled water? No, no. We Put it in a big distillation system. The agronomy team I work with at home calibrated agronomy 00:03:34 is working with Curt. They think that they've come up with a product, we're gonna test it. The base of the product is plant food. 00:03:40 The, the liquid wastewater fertility that I use. 'cause it's a very acidic product. We need some acid to break these bicarbonate apart. 00:03:46 So plant food is the base. We're calling it plant food on steroids right now. CURT's testing it. We, 00:03:51 he was just at my shop last week with his team. We're looking at ways to battle this problem because it exists everywhere. 00:03:57 Johnny Rell, again, my good friend and partner in Jackson, Tennessee, his dry land yields are better than his irrigated yields. 00:04:03 That's not a, it's a water problem. It's a water problem. Clearly when you're saying yeah, the plant needs water to live, 00:04:08 but the water you're putting onto there is causing it some stunt. Right. So what It's doing Yeah. And it really is. It's 00:04:12 a block. Well it just inhibits Uptake. It's blocking the system. Again, back to the analogy of the coke, right? 00:04:16 It's, it's that, it's that high fructose corn syrup. It's going in, it's doing something to that plant and that soil that is negative. It really is. 00:04:24 So the answer is use other amendments to the water. 'cause you can't change your well water. You can only amend it with uh Right. We 00:04:32 Can't, yeah. You know, like, uh, at my farm we've been amending the water with plant food, but the volume of it is a lot 00:04:38 and that that isn't something that we can ship to other people. Ship to other parts of the country. So the plant food on 00:04:44 steroids kind of turns up the ability of the, of the product to really amend the water in a less volumous way, 00:04:50 which doesn't have the logistical process. This Is something Kurt, this is something we never even would've thought about just as recently as a few years ago. 00:04:55 Right. As you're like, oh man, yeah, get this can put the water on that crop and you're gonna get better 00:04:59 crops 'cause we need to irrigate it. No, you also might be putting minerals out there that are causing tie up, et cetera. Right. 00:05:04 We have a pivot on our farm and Kansas where the corner out yielded the pivot by 29 bushel in 2010. 00:05:11 And so that's kind of when we started really digging into that and trying to figure out, well what's going on 00:05:15 that a dry land corner would out yield what's underneath the irrigator. So the answer is test the water 00:05:21 and then figure out the amendment that you can use to make it so that you don't tie up the minerals, et cetera. Right. 00:05:25 And actually what we've learned now is it's not in the past, we've always done a soil test. We've done a water test, or now with calibrated agronomy, 00:05:32 we're doing a test that puts those two together. Yep. And, and basically going deeper and understanding those interactions of what's going on. I 00:05:38 Have a thing, we're gonna be digging into this and we're gonna learn more one year from now. You'll know more than you do right now just 00:05:42 'cause we're still kind of at the new part of this, uh, testing. Correct. His name's Kurt Grim, I telling you. 00:05:48 Joined by Kelly Garrett talking about water quality. He started off by comparing, putting bad stuff in your body through a Coca-Cola 00:05:53 as you like putting bad water into your plant. I don't mind, Kurt, you wanna go ahead and talk about Coors or Co Coca-Cola, 00:05:59 but if you start talking about drinking Coors being bad for your body, we might have a problem. All right. Alright. We'll remember 00:06:03 that if you mentioned coming at you from commodity class 00:06:05.605 --> 00:06:07.245