Farming Video | Wet Field Fertilizer Application Strategy

16 May 25 • 2m 15s

Johnny Verell shares how heavy rains in West Tennessee have made it tough to get corn in the ground and fertilizer applied. With over 20 inches of rain in March and April, he’s turned to stream bars for fertilizer application instead of traditional knife rigs, which would just make a mess in these wet conditions. He explains how streaming allows them to cover wide areas efficiently, applying anywhere from 45 to 80 gallons per acre depending on the field.

Stream bars allow farmers to efficiently apply fertilizer even in muddy, waterlogged fields, preventing soil damage and keeping operations on schedule.
Adding IC concentrates helps reduce nitrogen burn and enhances soil health, leading to better crop performance in challenging conditions.
Using sprayers with stream bars instead of knife rigs helps avoid deep ruts and keeps equipment out of the mud, ensuring smoother field management.

00:00:00 Johnny Verell at Stream Ag. I'm out here today. We're fertilizing some of our corn. You know, we've had a tough time this year. 00:00:05 The weather's been crazy. I'd be scared to say how much rain we've had in the last two months, but I'm gonna say in the month of March 00:00:12 and the month of April now into May here I would pretty much guarantee we've had north of 20 inches. 00:00:17 And so it's been a ton of rain. It's been pretty hard to get the crop in this field we're in, was actually planted the middle of March, 00:00:23 got replanted, uh, the middle of April. I just had 14 inch rain come in on it over a few days and just absolutely messed the stand up. 00:00:30 So we killed it off, started over and now we're out here today fertilizing, you know, and West Tennessee. 00:00:34 We've been doing things like this for a long time. I didn't come up with this. Different people have been doing it for a long time. 00:00:39 We've been doing it for several years ourselves now. We've done all kinds of different tests, seeing if streaming is better than knife rig or y dropping 00:00:46 or easy dropping or whatever you got and what we came up with. Streaming works great for us, I believe. 00:00:51 You know, easy drops, y drops are great for late season applications, but for us this time of year, 120 foot wide, 00:00:57 we're running anywhere from 45 to 55 gallons to the acre. Sometimes on the irrigated we'll go all the way up 00:01:02 to 80 depending on what we have down in Flatten. But as you can tell here, the ground's kind of heavy. It sprinkled here today, probably about a 10th. 00:01:08 It's constantly raining on us and it's making it real hard for us to keep everything going. 00:01:12 You know, for us it's always hard to get the fertilize out and this year would be extremely tough. 00:01:16 Had several people call me locally asking, you know, how do the stream bars work? What do you need to do to make 'em work? 00:01:21 And you know, for us, we used to run 60 foot knife rigs. It's so wet here right now for the most part. 00:01:27 You'd have to be running four wheel drive and just be making a mess. We run stream bars just like 00:01:31 we're running on this sprayer right here. We add a gallon to a gallon and a half of ic depending on the rates we're putting out. 00:01:36 Most of our ground gets a gallon and a half or 12% ic. You really can't even see the fertilizer coming outta the sprayer 'cause it's so black. 00:01:41 We run a really good concentration of IC and it really, uh, helps with any type of burn mediation you might have. 00:01:47 And you know, hum, it's great for everything going on in the soil and it, and it really works well with nitrogen in itself. 00:01:52 So that's how we do it here on Vall Farms. It's worked great. Temple started doing it now Kelly's going running it this year. 00:01:58 He wanted to know what tips I was running, what stream bars I was running. And it's mainly just for the 00:02:02 usability of getting over the field. And if you can't get in with a tractor, you can usually always get in 00:02:06 with a sprayer and make it work. So we'll keep you posted on how it works 00:02:09.245 --> 00:02:10.305

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