Why Is Fungicide Application at R3 Crucial for Maximizing Soybean Yields?

00:00 So guys, I'm here in Clint, Missouri, and, uh, I'm with Caleb from BASF and Wayne Bowden, who's an extreme Ag member. 00:06 I'm from extreme ag myself. And this is one of the things I really like to talk about and what we're talking about here today is, 00:13 is a fungicide treatment on soybeans. You know, in years past, a lot of people, I think still today, you know, I don't know 00:19 what the percentage is, but a lot of guys don't fungicide their beans. Right. You know, and that's one thing we've learned that 00:24 that maybe propels us over. You know, the standard growing is, is fungicide. You know, we're fungicide for disease of course, 00:32 but what we're all almost as important as that is, is plant health and the, and the, and the increased yield. We've seen upwards of 13 bushels, uh, you know, 00:40 in plots we done five or six years ago, you know, no fungicide against fungicide. And in the middle of that we would have a, uh, 00:48 I guess you would call it a generic fungicide. You know, it'd be five or six. But we were in that 13, 15 range with something like reek. 00:56 Uh, reek is, is what, what I call at home a premium, a premium fungicide. It's got all the goodies in it. 01:02 And, uh, you know, I say this all the time, you know, you won't send your kid to to school and at 35 degrees in a T-shirt, you know, 01:10 you're gonna put a coat on 'em, you're gonna put a sweater underneath that coat. That's kind of, to me, what fungicide does is it, it, 01:15 it relieve, it relieves stress. And that's the biggest yield robber in a soybean is stress. So anything you can do 01:21 to relieve this plant from having stress, that's when you pick up the bushels. I, I, I wonder what y'all think about that yourselves. 01:27 Well, I've tried that years ago. You know, spraying a field, make the outside rounds, and then spray over maybe half and then quit the field 01:33 and outside rounds, you know, anywhere from 10 13 bushel, like you say, advantage. 01:38 And I've done that several times and I won't even, I won't even go a year without fungicide and beans anymore, unless it's just a total 01:44 drought disaster or something. Yeah. But you know, I I fungicide every acre every year, Well, 10 bushels at $10, 01:50 even at today's price, a hundred bucks. Uh, uh, a application of TEX is gonna cost what, 16, 15? Somewhere in that range, depending on 01:58 Fungicide, insecticide, you'll be in the, you know, the mid to upper twenties. Yeah. But still, I mean, 02:02 you're talking about a good return on investment. You know, I'll take 20 from a hundred any day you want to give it to me's. 02:07 Right. Matter of fact, if you wanna do that today, we can change. I'll give y'all both 20 for a couple hundred bucks 02:12 Outta my pockets aren't deep enough. There you go. So we're talking about putting the finishing touches on, on this crop. 02:19 And so this, we run the BSF herbicide program and, and we've done those pieces and we were looking to see what stage of soybeans are in. 02:25 And they're right at R two right now. We can see flowers all the way up to the very tip top and down in the lower part 02:32 of the canopy we see a little bit of pod development. Mm-Hmm. And so they're just, they're knocking on the door to R three. 02:37 And so kind of my suggestion would be, Wayne, is that we wait just a little bit, but not too long. Maybe about seven days or so around here. Yeah. 02:44 About a week. Yep. Seven days. Um, we got a little bug pressure going on in this part of the world. 02:48 We, we deal with a lot of like, uh, caterpillars. We deal with uh, pod worms, we deal with uh, loopers. Japanese beetles have been a new pest that we've dealt 02:58 with in the last four, four or five years that just continues to build on us. And all those things kind of contribute to the, 03:03 what I call the insect complex. Any one bug may not be in an economic threshold, but you take all five or six of them and they're Sure. 03:09 Sure. Doing some seed damage. Exactly. Mm-Hmm. And you can take 25, 30% leaf feeding when the beans are vegetated. 03:14 Mm-Hmm. But once they start getting reproductive, like these are here, it's 10% or less and you don't wanna wait until you've had an economic 03:20 loss before you pull the trigger. Exactly. You pull, pull the trigger right before you get to that zone. 03:24 Mm-Hmm. So we're looking at that. We're gonna put the finishing touches on with some reek and some fast stack and amid 03:30 and that'll give us some good residual to extend our residual out on both the insecticide. And then reek has out there like five weeks plus 03:37 of residual on the uh, disease side. Okay. So when using reek is is a perfect time to put a little foli of your nutrition with it. 03:44 Is there anything EK won't blend with like potassiums or any types of foliar nitrogens or anything of that sort? Not that I'm aware of yet. 03:52 But I always tell folks to do a JAR test. Yeah. And that's something Wayne will be happy to share with you have an Excel spreadsheet 03:58 and we can mix up a mason jar of stuff. Mm-Hmm. Mix it around a little bit, see how it works. Make sure that it's gonna work for you. Fill a sprayer up. 04:04 Oh, oh definitely. Yeah. And That goes back to prevent problems versus cure 'em is kind of what I'm all after. 04:09 And so, um, I can sure provide you that spreadsheet. Okay. We'll go through that and uh, mix 04:13 that recipe up and see what it does. And if it does something that we don't like, well we'll just try to change something. Right. 04:18 We may have to run two trips on some of its, Yeah. Well I can tell you this Wayne. 04:21 I do some crazy stuff at R three that is my money shot. If, if we're gonna enhance yield in a soybean, it's at that R three stage. 04:27 So there's probably very few products in my crops that I've made that I didn't mix with reek and I haven't found the first one that, you know, 04:34 with almost, you know, any of the products reek mixed with, I've never had a sprayer issue. 04:39 'cause of you want the fertility out there at the same time. Exactly. You're protecting that plant with plant health. 04:43 You're giving it to nutrients, it needs, you know, all at the same time you're gonna go for insects either way. Oh yeah. You know, 'cause that's you're making Yeah. 04:51 So you can go ahead and put all that stuff in there at R three and you know, you hear a lot of R one, a lot 04:55 of R five stuff, you know, and that works, you said so about unless your beans are burning up, you know. 05:00 Mm-Hmm. In the south where we have all the heat, when I get to that R five stage, if it's super hot, you know, 05:06 we may not get that benefit then, but we're gonna get it at that R three stage when we put that fungicide out and the nutrients out with it. 05:13 Do you do any R five after R three applications? Like two trips On any I've done, I've done that. 05:19 I feel like in my personal farm, that R three applications what's doing it, we're continuing to test that R five mm-Hmm. 05:26 Uh, you know, our biggest disease in soybeans is frogeye, you know, and buddy, if we seen it this year, you know, 05:33 I got to where I wasn't worried about frogeye 'cause it just wasn't, it wasn't present anymore. A lot of the varieties were resistant to it, 05:40 but this year we battled it a lot. So had we not put a fungicide out, I don't know what kind of yield we had lost from there. Right. 05:47 I had talked a little bit about layering fungicides. Mm-Hmm. And there's a couple places I think it has a good return on investment and that's what I recommend 05:53 around here is stuff that I've learned that works in West Central Missouri. Yep. And one place is seed bean production. 05:59 And so we'll actually make the application at R two, which is where these beans are today. Mm-Hmm. And then we'll come in about three weeks later 06:05 or so with Revy Tech at that time. So a lot of times I'll run Preor on the first application. Okay. It's a little bit less expensive, 06:11 but it gives good residual and it's got headline in it so it gives you the plant health benefits. And then about three weeks to four weeks later I come back 06:19 with the Revy tech and then that takes you all the way to the end. Make sure that we don't have any diseases on our seed beans. 06:24 The other place that I do that is in April planted soybeans. So in this part of the world we got more 06:28 and more people that are pushing the envelope trying to plant beans earlier in the season if the grounds fit. Mm-Hmm. And in that case, 06:34 those things stay reproductive longer than a bean planted in May or June. I mean they'll stay reproductive 45 days instead 06:40 of 25 or 30 days. Mm-Hmm. So in that case we gotta keep them protected during that phase of their life. 06:45 And those beans a lot of times have better yield potential and can do better things. But you gotta take care of 'em during those phases too. 06:51 Because if you don't, um, something will always sneak in your back door and take all that extra yield off your plates. 06:56 Well and it's funny you said that because we planted the last three years we've been planting beans in February just 07:01 to see if we can get a second crop out. One of my main products that goes in my in furrow, I'm not a big infer guy in normal planted seasoned beans, 07:10 but when we're planting the ultra earlys preor is going in that tank, it's going in that trench. 07:15 You know, it protects that bean 'cause it may be 20 days coming outta the ground. Right. And it'll literally protect that bean, 07:20 that seedling bean before it emerges from the ground. I've seen it time and time again. That's Why we use that post and the beans that 07:26 that state gives you two to three weeks. Yep. Really solid disease protection. And then you kind of put the Cadillac on the end, 07:32 that's the, the one that finishes you out for the next five or six mm-Hmm. And when you do that, you're fully 07:36 protected for the entire season. But I also try to do what fits the farmer's farm. You know, in this case we didn't plant beans 07:43 as early as May we wanted to Wayne. Right. We have all that wet weather in May. And so we do what's right for the farmer 07:49 and in this case the best return on investment would be one application at R three mm-Hmm. 07:53 And I'm very confident in that. Mm-Hmm. So, Sounds good. Alright.