00:00:00 Johnny Rell Extreme Ag. I'm out here today with Brewer. Bless it. You know, we were talking about doing some burn down. 00:00:04 We started about a week ago. We started doing some burn down and the importance of checking your water 00:00:09 and all the issues that can cause, 'cause you know, really in the farming industry, water's the cheapest thing that we're using on our farm, 00:00:15 but it can actually cause to somewhat the most impact if a product's gonna work or not. 00:00:20 Yep. So, uh, we're, we got actually two samples of water. And just to show you the variability that can exist 00:00:24 between, uh, water solutions. Johnny, yours is a municipal water source. Is that No, this is well, water. 00:00:29 That's well water at Johnny's. This is from north Mississippi. The same situation. This is well water on the farm there in Mississippi. 00:00:35 There are a few very key components or characteristics of water. Um, oftentimes we hear about the hardness and, 00:00:41 and that varies from well to, well, we also talk about pH and importance of not just the efficacy of the herbicide 00:00:46 or fungicide, but the duration of it in a spray solution. We'll touch on that in a minute. Uh, 00:00:51 and total ZO solids can also be a big part of that. Um, and it's important to, to really figure out how to treat your water before you begin 00:00:59 any process out in the field. Yeah, and I mean, we're just looking at the differences. Unreal, just in color, but pH is a difference. 00:01:05 But here you go down the road, less than a mile, I've got water samples for the pH, is actually, you know, one point higher. 00:01:11 So we go from roughly a six pH here, where we're at to seven pH just right down the road. So I really think farmers, you know, 00:01:17 I didn't realize it changed that much. You know, I would never want to use water. It looked like that in my sprayer. 00:01:21 'cause all the issues it could cause, but that's what, that's what, that's what you gotta use. So at the end of the day, we just wanted to break down 00:01:27 and kind of look at, and we're gonna show some demonstrations of what different phs are and different products that'll help with that. 00:01:32 And we always think that the municipal water sources, I've got quite a few in Mississippi that run that are, are, are better water or clean water. 00:01:38 And, and they may be clean of say the hardness, but a lot of times they're phs. I mean, we got some areas that pH is almost nine. 00:01:45 We talked a little bit about the efficacy in the plant. If we target a pH somewhere, I like to be around five, slightly below five. 00:01:52 Um, but we've got a lot of sources where they're running, you know, at nine or so, 00:01:56 and we talk about the efficacy getting in the plant. Uh, that I like the low pH primarily for that. Um, however, there's also another component 00:02:03 and that's the, the, the duration or stability of a herbicide or a fungicide within a spray solution. 00:02:09 There's a lot of herbicides that break down pretty rapidly. Sub seven pH I mean above seven pH there's some fungicides 00:02:16 that will actually have a halflife of about four minutes if your pH is up there above seven. So you need to be really cognizant of that fact too, 00:02:23 because how many times you going to spray, uh, an entire load, you know, from when you mix it up in the next hour or so. 00:02:29 So that's another component to it. Yeah, we've, uh, done a really good job, uh, say 15 years ago of treating the hardness of water, the, 00:02:36 the, the, the mineral elements, primarily calcium and magnesium, because of the effect they had on, on, uh, on roundups particularly, we kind of drifted away from that 00:02:44 and true understanding of it. In the beginning it was really all about, um, adding a MS to your water and it was intended to be in there 00:02:53 for about two hours before you put herbicide in there. Well, came on a lot of different, um, water conditioners where they're actually putting it in immediately 00:03:01 with either a sometimes after their herbicide. So the whole conditioning process hadn't been working. Yeah, We got water, got water quality, got pH you know, 00:03:11 there's all kinds of options out there that we can use to test it. That's correct. And so you, again, you just a closeup 00:03:16 of the differences in these two, two different well water sources not too terribly far apart. Um, a lot of people are, uh, tend to, uh, want to use these 00:03:24 electric meters and there's nothing wrong with 'em. Uh, if I can get this open, but this is a typical meter, um, and you, you would just basically stick it in the water. 00:03:32 So the pH s most people take it and they test it immediately, but that's not how they're meant to be used. 00:03:37 You actually have to calibrate these things and it's not a really simple process. It can take a while. And, 00:03:41 and doing all those functions with two buttons is really frustrating. So it's not a bad idea, 00:03:46 but it's probably more complicated than it is feasible On the turn row. You also have these meters that can test 00:03:50 for total dissolved solids in ec. Again, nothing wrong with it, but probably not as great, uh, to use on the turn row. 00:03:57 You can send your water, uh, off to a lab for testing. One of the things Johnny and I have kinda landed on, I'll let him touch on this. Yeah, 00:04:04 Amazon, you got cheap strips on Amazon. A lot of times you can get pool testing strips, stuff like this. 00:04:08 These are actually saying drinking water test strips. But the cool thing about those is you don't have to have individual meters that do one thing at a time. 00:04:15 They'll test about 10 things at one time. And what we realized, they're pretty accurate. We, yeah, we were actually trying to calibrate these 00:04:20 and we were checking 'em on these test strips and they seem to be more accurate every single time. Tell us 00:04:24 A lot more anyway. Yeah, for sure. Um, and it's, it's seconds. Seconds. Yeah, absolutely. It's 00:04:29 Instant knowledge. So, And one thing we had bought the simplest test strips we could find, and then probably the most complex 00:04:34 and my thought was the most complex I'd wanna throw away, but actually I, I like it 00:04:38 better than anything else we've done today Because that tells you So many things. So many things. That's 00:04:41 Right. So, and if we were dealing with city water, it tells you your chlorine content. So if you need to get the chlorine out, you can turn around 00:04:46 and test to see if you're able to neutralize the chlorine. 00:04:48.635 --> 00:04:50.845