Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Just Say hey. The podcast. A podcast where we talk about the things that matter to small farms. You know why? Because we are a small farm. Today's really cool. I've got a guy sitting here next to me, a regional agronomist for AgroLiquid. They're a liquid fertilizer manufacturer, but one of the things we like well, several of the things we like about them. First, they put a lot of science behind their product and do a lot of continual studies. But the most important thing to us as a farmer, we've seen some major turnarounds in our crop and I attribute a lot of the success we have had to the use of their products. So let's get into it today. Welcome to Just Say hey. The podcast where we talk about what matters to small farms, whether it's business, marketing, agronomy, equipment, livestock health. If it matters to small farms, we'll probably talk about it here. So let's get into it. Welcome back. So sitting next to me here is Dan Peterson. He is the field agronomy manager for the Midwest. Is that, technically, your title?

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yeah, close enough. Regional agronomist.

Speaker 1: 1:00

I saw all the things across your name that looks like a doctor.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Yeah, well, I'm a certified crop advisor and a certified sustainability specialist Very cool.

Speaker 1: 1:11

I'm going to throw a question at you that I asked you earlier, because I think it's fun, and it's just going to be fun, I'm going to throw it back at you what's your favorite music album?

Speaker 2: 1:21

Tapestry by Carole King.

Speaker 1: 1:23

You know, carole man, what a great songwriter, and we shared her off the podcast. We both I was, I was in the music business for a long time and share a passion for music. You said your kids were into music too and what you know.

Speaker 2: 1:36

So I know farming was a passion as well, and so that's it's kind of weird to meet somebody that has the same two passions when I walked into your, into your studio, into your office, and saw that music production equipment, like, okay, I'm definitely going to have to get to know you, john. We share that passion for music. But we are also discovering that we share a passion for forages. And that's going to be exciting going forward, because I think you're on a very interesting path here.

Speaker 1: 2:17

On what you're trying to do with alfalfa and grass forages, sharon, that need for an economically balanced approach to nutrition, because we've talked about that from the agronomic side. We know what it needs. But you also have to balance how do we afford it? And agri-liquid, at least in my experience so far, has really helped me get a little bit better economically on the farm. How to get those nutrients to the plant in a more economical way. Better economically on the farm, how to get those nutrients to the plant in a more economical way.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Dry fertilizers yes, we need them, right, but dry fertilizers are very inefficient when it comes to getting into the plant itself. Okay, they have to be dissolved in soil moisture for the roots to take up any of the nutrition. But when that happens, they're reactive with other elements of the soil, phosphorus in particular, and so you start getting this tie-up, and so we only get 10% to 30% efficiency out of dry fertilizers. Well, with forages, they're growing rapidly and you're taking multiple cuttings, so you're getting multiple crops, so they need that nutrition every time you're going to be taking a cutting, and so how can we make that more efficient? Well, one of the things that we've discovered with AgroLiquid is that our products can be soil applied, yes, but they're very, very efficient when you put them on as a foliar application.

Speaker 1: 3:43

Right.

Speaker 2: 3:44

So we can use less actual nutrition and get more nutrition on a per acre basis. For example, Right Fewer pounds of a nutrient like phosphorus or potassium and actually use less of it, but get more into the crop itself, get more into the plant Right and they respond to that.

Speaker 1: 4:03

And we've noticed it into the plant Right and they respond to that and we've noticed it. I mean, I know, again beginning farmer, I've noticed things. Like you know, applying fertilizer will apply in the fall. It takes a long time for that fertilizer to break down and become available to the plant, Correct, and so we've originally looked at agri-liquid as a way to solve an immediate problem. We see a deficiency in a field and we need to fix it immediately. Well, dry fertilizer can't do that.

Speaker 2: 4:29

Correct. Yeah, we like to look at it in terms of the dry fertilizer is a soil amendment, use it to correct a long-term, to correct a deficiency, say to build up a potassium deficiency. Right, and we know forages use a lot of potassium. But we look at agri-liquid applied as a foliar. As we're feeding this crop this cutting or this year, we're giving it what it needs right now. Well, we're not necessarily feeding it for the future, we're feeding it for what we need right now.

Speaker 1: 5:04

And that's interesting because the way I think about it is you know, the guy out there in the field every day mowing and raking and baling and all of that. The way I've thought of it is exactly that way that the soil is, basically I want to be able to give that plant everything it needs to survive and then, when it's done for the season, I will have taken as little out of that soil as possible. So I leave my soil in that great condition it was in before the season started, instead of thinking about I'm just going to deplete the soil and then I'm going to refeed it and then I'm going to deplete the soil again. Is that an accurate way for me to think about it?

Speaker 2: 5:36

It is. And while we always consider dry fertilizers as a tool in our toolbox, you have to look at the economic side. And how much are we spending on fertilizer, especially in the face of low crop prices and so on and so forth? And fertilizer can be a major expense, oh yeah, you know, regardless of crops, but especially on forages, because when we remove the whole plant, we're taking a lot of nutrition off of the field, right. So how do we deal with that? We're taking a lot of nutrition off of the field, right. So how do we deal with that?

Speaker 2: 6:05

We have discovered that in our research that when we replace some of that nutrition as a foliar okay, so you're putting in nutrition into this crop Right Now, you remove it, now you repeat the process for the next cutting. In the meantime, that plant is drawing less from the soil, right? So we have found that oftentimes when we bring in an agro-liquid foliar program, we can start reducing our dry fertilizer. In fact, we have customers who monitor their fields quite closely and have for years, and they've used agro-liquid for years and they have found that they have been able to drop their dry fertilizer substantially.

Speaker 1: 6:41

Right, because this past year was the first. I think we did a test two years ago, but this was really the first year that we've used agri-liquid as a major component of our fertilizer plan. We still do dry fertilizer. We still replace that potash.

Speaker 1: 6:57

Potash is a good one to put on when the price is right, but balancing that economic need with that nutritional need and sometimes it's a balancing act because you have X number of dollars and the plant needs this where do you sacrifice? And we found, at least in our experience thus far, that we are spending less money on overall nutrition than we were the year before, right. So you know, especially as fertilizer prices have gone through the roof Now they've kind of settled a little bit, but you know it's still pretty expensive and still not back to 2018 levels. So you know we were talking before we jumped on here about. You know, we really talked to a lot of small farmers in that two, five, 10, 50, 100 acre kind of guys. How can a person that's running an operation that's that size really take advantage of agri-liquid as a product? Looking at that same dry versus liquid.

Speaker 2: 7:57

That's a really good question and I would say the versatility of our products comes to the top and our packaging. So, whether it's a tote, two and a half gallon jugs are very convenient for these smaller guys. They don't have to worry about bringing in any kind of storage tank or anything like that. So we have flexibility with our packaging. That makes it convenient. Some of our products are blends already packaged. For example, Fertorain is just an outstanding foliar product for alfalfa grass haze, especially small grains. But looking at, say, a mixed grass alfalfa blend or a straight grass blend, Fertorain is terrific.

Speaker 1: 8:42

No, that's one of the products that we use. In fact we worked with some other small farms using that product. It was interesting. It was already pre-blend, made it easy, right. But from their point of view, you can't get the big fertilizer companies to come look at a four-acre patch. They can't get their equipment in and turn it around because they're running such large equipment Right, and you can put it on with a small sprayer. You know a lot of these people are also growing vegetable gardens. They could easily put that as fertigation into an irrigation of a small vegetable garden, correct.

Speaker 2: 9:22

It's a 12% nitrogen, 3% phosphorus, 3% potassium, 1.5% sulfur and then some manganese as well, and really those nutrients are all needed by grasses in particular, right. But they also work very well on We've had great success with them on tomatoes, right. A lot of our customers that are putting for rain or other of our products on, say, an alfalfa field or grass field, they uh will take some of that in the smaller about, just put it in a hand sprayer and use it other gardens, you know, and it was pretty good stuff so we were walking a field earlier today and you were telling me about, you know, working with a lot of different forage guys and that you've worked.

Speaker 1: 10:01

You know really been passionate about the forage side because, let's face it, there is a lot of different forage guys, and that you've worked. You know really been passionate about the forage side Cause, let's face it, there is a lot of guys doing corn and beans, especially down in our area. The vast majority of farms that are commercial scale are corn and beans. When you get to the smaller scale guys, we're doing a lot of little things to make a farm work, whether you're running livestock, whether we're we're doing vegetables, we're doing pumpkins. I've got a friend who does pumpkins and some vegetables in the summer. So we have to figure out ways to become economically viable on a super small scale. So we look at least in our operation and we're getting to where we're larger. I mean we're about 850 acres of forage and that's a lot of throwing bales. Yeah, imagine being a kid doing that with 50-pound bales or something.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Hey, when I was a teenager I got heat exhaustion throwing small bales up in an A-mile on a 95-degree day.

Speaker 1: 10:54

I got to ask you how much did you get paid to bale?

Speaker 2: 10:58

I just got paid by the hour. Oh, I got paid $1.50 an hour.

Speaker 1: 11:01

I worked for a guy down the road here when I was a kid and we got I think we got five cents a bale, a nickel a bale and I remember another guy paid me 10 cents and I thought I was king of the world 10 cents a bale I'm going to take over the world.

Speaker 2: 11:18

Well, you talked about how can we help these smaller farmers. What I find interesting is that in the course of my career I saw so many traditional family farms. You know I'm from Wisconsin so it's called the dairy state for good reason. At one point in time 90% of all farms in Wisconsin had dairy. Obviously, today that's shifted and you know I've watched in the course of my career farm after farm after farm after farm get sold, get rented out and cow herds get sold and now we've got these grand old dairy barns sitting empty.

Speaker 2: 11:52

But there's been a kind of an interesting movement. We would lament the loss of the family farm and what also has happened is land prices have gone very high, equipment prices are very high. What's an entry point for someone who wants to get into agriculture, who wants to do farming at some scale. Maybe it's going to be a part-time endeavor, but we've seen the rise of the craft brewing industry, the microbreweries, right. We've seen the rise of the craft distilleries We've like in Wisconsin there's several distilleries that are now farm to bottle, which is a fascinating thing. But vegetable gardening, maybe specialty livestock like goats, for example. Now we have smaller scale Now. Maybe it's an entry point.

Speaker 2: 12:44

That's right For somebody to get in, and we'll call it craft farming.

Speaker 1: 12:48

Yeah, you know we were talking about this before the podcast that it's hard for a young guy to get started.

Speaker 1: 12:53

I talked to a guy the other day he's a friend of mine, he's probably third or fourth generation here, works for the family farm during harvest Works but has an off-farm job and then on the side runs, you know, does vegetables and pumpkins and stuff like that, and he's trying to make his own way, doesn't have a, you know, none of the family because they row crop. They don't have that. You know that equipment that you need on the small scale. So it's difficult but not impossible, right? So you know, we see you read article after article after article of people saying, oh, we need to change our food industry, we need to buy local. And the big challenge is getting the consumer to follow through and actually buy local, because there is a growing industry of having a vegetable garden down the road. Buy your vegetables from them. We go out of our way to buy our eggs from local farmers, go out of our way to try, during the season, buy vegetables.

Speaker 2: 13:48

And if you're one of these local, we'll call it a craft farmer. Now you're not going to get served very well by the larger farm supply companies, the retail farm supply companies, because you mentioned it earlier large equipment they sell thousands and thousands of tons of fertilizer, you know crop protection chemicals in large volumes. You know you can't bring in a custom application machine with 120 foot boom On four acres.

Speaker 2: 14:17

Because it doesn't work. That's right. So people like that are caught in a kind of a between a rock and a hard place, in that they need nutrition, they need advice, they need equipment. They need Right, but it has to be scaled.

Speaker 1: 14:33

Yeah, we sort of joke that it's between the farm store and the farm. You know you're too big to be able to go down to your local farm store and buy the cheapo products on the lot there. But you're too small to go to you know store and buy the cheapo products on the lot there. But you're too small to go to John Deere commercial. And that's not anything against John Deere or the small farm store. But you need that service that's at the same type of a level that you get from your major ag retailer. But you don't have that kind of a budget because they do. I mean those guys. What are they spraying? 1,000, 1,200 acres a day?

Speaker 1: 15:07

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean four acres. They can't even afford the time to turn off the road and turn around for that Correct, they got to keep moving.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Right. So I think, going back to the how do we help these farmers? I like our packaging two and a half gallon jugs. I like the fact that some of our products are already pre-blended, for that. The other thing about them is that mixing and matching. When it comes to liquid fertilizers, you oftentimes have to be careful with what you blend with it what products you blend together.

Speaker 2: 15:40

So, for example, if you blend a liquid calcium and a phosphorus, you're going to get cottage cheese. Yeah, our products are formulated differently, and so we can blend our calcium and our phosphorus and be perfectly fine, right. But that also comes to like crop protection chemicals. You need insecticides sometimes, because we were talking about army worms earlier. Sometimes you just cannot afford to not put on an insecticide because you don't lose a crop.

Speaker 1: 16:05

That's right. Well, we had that problem. We were talking about it. We had a spot that was a half mile off the road. From the road it looked like it was about the size of a dime and by the time we could get to it it was probably 15 acres.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Right, but what did you do? You were going to spray foliar nutrition on that field anyway. That's right. Put in the insecticide and all in one.

Speaker 1: 16:25

Yep.

Speaker 2: 16:26

So that need for that goes all the way down to our craft farmers.

Speaker 1: 16:31

I'll tell you the need that I see and we've talked about it a little bit off camera and Ryan and I have talked about it a lot over the years is education. You know, if we've got a great product, it's very complicated. I mean, the things you do go, the things that AgriLiquid does go so far over my head in my understanding, but the kind of grassroots, down and you know, down and dirty, how, when and why should I use this? And understanding that, because I know, when I first got into farming I didn't have anybody to ask and so I hunted and pecked until I got it right, and that was a very expensive way to learn, you know.

Speaker 2: 17:11

Right.

Speaker 1: 17:12

So I mean, one of the things that I've liked about AgriLiquid is you guys have done a really good job of putting a I think you called it. I think I saw it was called Back to Basics.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Yeah, it's a to Basics. Yeah, ryan's been on that. Right, you mentioned Ryan, and it's a Back to Basics video. You can access it on our website. Right, and it just talks. It goes back to basic crop nutrition, right, what are the kind of basic requirements for various for crops? Right, you know? And from what are the basic principles of crop nutrition, of fertilizer technology, you know, how do we use these products and what's the timing of these products. It's a great series.

Speaker 1: 17:49

Yeah, and I mean they're helpful to me. I've watched a couple of them. I've watched more than that, but you know they help me make decisions because education I went over and did our friend Ryan, who's? You can't see him, but he's sitting over there in the dark. He's keeping me on it, that's right. But Ryan invited me to a seminar that one of your guys did Galen Beers did and it was fantastic for me because it was mostly big farmers in there. These guys were.

Speaker 1: 18:15

You could tell they were, they knew what they were doing and a guy like me sat there and learned so much in that room because the decisions I have to make on our farm are basically agronomic, economic and time. So how do you make those decisions? And if you've watched this podcast or listened to it, you know you make the best decision you can with the information you have. You move forward and hopefully you didn't screw up too bad and you learn and move forward. But the more education we can get and we can provide in easily understandable nuggets for smaller farmers helps them make those decisions which your product does. You know your line of products I really like because of that flexibility.

Speaker 2: 18:58

And we, as a company, believe in education Right, believe in education. We believe that the more our customers know and understand about agronomics, the better the customer they're going to be, because then they'll understand why we're telling them certain things right.

Speaker 2: 19:15

So if I'm giving you some agronomic advice and you don't know much about agronomics, you're not going to really be able to discern whether I'm telling you, giving you useful information. If I'm just trying to sell you a product and I don't care about more economic outcome, I'm just worried about my economic outcome From our standpoint, the more we can teach you as a customer about what's a soil test, what does it mean? How do we use it? How do we read mean? How do we use it? How do we read it? How do we read it? How do we use these numbers? So that when I sit down with you and start formulating a recommendation and we're looking at the soil test and I'm justifying what I'm telling you based on what I'm seeing, field needs or what your crop is, you're going to have that ability to discern whether I'm leading you down.

Speaker 1: 20:08

You know a good path or a yellow brick road and we've all, you know, we've all been there before and one of the things you know I bring up Ryan quite a bit because I know him really well but one of the things that I liked early on was the questions that Ryan asked from an agri-liquid point of view was, you know, was about answering my questions and I could tell right away these were not selfish economic questions.

Speaker 1: 20:34

So I mean, I've had sales guys come out here and try we were talking about one earlier tried to sell me a half a million dollar tractor. Well, I'm a hay farmer. I don't know how much he takes a bale of hay goes for, but you know, uh, you know, and and I could tell he wanted to sell a tractor, not he wanted to help me get to be the biggest best farm I can be. So you know that's been, that's been helpful in that kind of question, the open dialogue that we've been able to have, you know, since I met dan I met you this morning but a lot in common becoming fast friends, but being able to ask those questions and say how do we balance that need? For I told you I want to produce the absolute best crop I can, but I also know that at a certain point my customers aren't going to pay $700 for a bale of hay.

Speaker 2: 21:19

Right. No matter how good it is Kind of going back a little bit to the value of foliar nutrition Right In these forages. I think we saw a good example this morning when we were out looking at fields and you showed me a field that had been seeded, I believe the previous fall and lack of moisture, and so a lot of seeds did not germinate. You went ahead and put on agri.

Speaker 2: 21:46

seeds did not germinate, right, you went ahead and put on agri-liquid blend I did On that field I don't remember exactly what the portions were at the time Right, right. Anyway, you put that blend out there that coupled with some, at least a brief, incident of rainfall. You can't tell that that's a new seeding field anymore. That field looks lush, it's healthy. We've got a good stand.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Well, I'll tell you there was no alfalfa there, and I mean Ryan will attest to this. We went out there and west of that one landmark, that oil derrick there, whatever it is, there was no alfalfa. And now it looks as good as any other part of the field. And between those two points, the only treatment that received was agri-liquid and I probably received a little bit of luck with some rain and temperature and things like that. But Well, sure you know.

Speaker 2: 22:39

I've discovered earlier in my career, even pre-agro-liquid days, that alfalfa liked foliar nutrition. What I've discovered with agro-liquid products and we talked about the research I did back in 2015, 16, 17, is that alfalfa has real propensity, a real ability to absorb foliar nutrition. With agro-liquid products I can use rates and timings on alfalfa, like with our liquid sulfur product Access. For example, I can put on three to five gallons of Access per acre on nice lush alfalfa. I don't get any leaf speckling at all.

Speaker 1: 23:19

Really.

Speaker 2: 23:20

And the alfalfa just loves it. Because alfalfa, being a high-protein crop, needs sulfur, because sulfur is a critical component of protein.

Speaker 1: 23:28

Right, and alfalfa is just like come on, bring it on, bring it on. I wonder if that sulfur could have been a deficiency, helping with. You know, when we talked about earlier in that field, that it produced tonnage, but the quality was not where I wanted it to be, yep, and so I wonder if Mm-hmm that I could put on foliar on alfalfa, if I was limited, you know.

Speaker 2: 23:57

You said, dan, there's a new law. You can only put on one nutrient on alfalfa from this point forward, it would be sulfur.

Speaker 1: 24:03

Okay.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Yeah, Access in it's a 17% sulfur Right. But that foliar in alfalfa just does remarkable things.

Speaker 1: 24:10

Yeah, we've noticed and you know the way you said it earlier kind of gave me a new way to think about it. We are, we're harvesting that crop, we're asking that root system to generate plant matter and then we're taking it away. It's got to generate it from someplace. And I thought you know, like with our grass crops, we're doing two treatments of an agri-liquid product on our grass crops and we're doing three on our alfalfa and we saw we see the tonnage go through the root. I mean we really did see almost a ton an acre increase. Now I think we need to start fine tuning them. We've talked about that before. It's the things we need in some of that. Some of that may be the sulfur. That one crop we were talking about is a new seeding that had not gotten treated the way, the way the other crops had. So you know, I think those things are interesting. We've talked about how do we help small farmers utilize this.

Speaker 2: 25:03

One of the ways I think we can help these small farmers is through soil testing. Some of these farmers, you know they're new to agriculture. Okay, they've had a career off the farm, right, they've maybe never been exposed to farming at all, but they want to grow something. They want to be productive. They love the idea of growing not only their own food but growing food for their neighbors and bringing back. I grew up in the era of the neighborhood grocery store. Yep, you know, we had little neighborhood grocery stores. We didn't have Walmarts and Meyers and Kroger's on these huge supermarkets, so we bought local, we bought from people we knew.

Speaker 1: 25:44

I grew up outside of Philadelphia and I, even as a kid, I loved farming. You know what I did to make a little extra money. We would grow cucumbers and squash in our backyard and you know what I'd do? I'd walk around with a wagon. There you go, sell cucumbers and squash. There you go. So yeah, yeah, but you're right, you bought from your neighbor.

Speaker 2: 26:01

You were passionate before you didn't even know. You were passionate about agriculture.

Speaker 1: 26:04

Actually, there's a pretty girl that had a mother who liked to cook, so I went.

Speaker 2: 26:07

Well, that's something to be passionate about. It doesn't take a lot of time to kind of coach people through that. Okay, what does this mean? I got this result. I can coach somebody through that fairly quickly and we don't have to get really down and dirty. We don't have to give them complicated programs. We don't have to get real complicated with blending and mixing and so on and so forth. We can keep it at a pretty simple basic level and do them a whole lot of good from a nutrition standpoint, because you know what? Maybe they're getting horse manure from a neighbor, maybe they're getting cow manure from a neighbor.

Speaker 2: 26:43

But in many cases they're not. So they're in a situation where they're kind of pulling nutrition out of the soil.

Speaker 1: 26:48

And that's two different situations there One where you have no additive, manure or anything like that, and some where you do so. It's different mineral deficiencies.

Speaker 2: 26:56

Correct. Yeah, absolutely. And even if you are able to amend your soil with, say, a neighbor's manure, which is always good, we have found that oftentimes some foliar supplementation to that really brings it to a different level. I saw that out in Western Kansas. 13 to 15 tons of dry lot beef manure on alfalfa. The previous fall on paper.

Speaker 1: 27:22

Looked right.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Giving the alfalfa all the phosphorus and potassium and sulfur it needed. Yet we got huge. We almost doubled the tonnage with five gallons of agri-liquid as a foliage.

Speaker 1: 27:38

To supplement, I'll tell you a challenge we have here in this part of the country and we've talked about it a lot as we've gone through the fields and how much work it has taken to get rid of invasive species the waterhamps, the amaranths, the spiny amaranths. So if you're getting your neighbor's horse manure or cattle manure and they have eaten bales where they have that seed pod still there that flows through, it's a really good point. You know, we don't have the benefit in a lot of cases here of having high quality you know high quality hay which is free of that stuff.

Speaker 2: 28:10

Right.

Speaker 1: 28:11

So you know that's a challenge. So we end up fighting the weed problem as well. So you know it's just a challenge. We have a lot. Every, I'm sure, every area, every region you go to, because you handle Illinois and you go all the way up to Western Canada.

Speaker 2: 28:25

Well, yeah, five or six states do some national stuff too, but then all of Western Canada in addition to that.

Speaker 1: 28:32

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's a large territory, it's a challenge, but it's also a blessing, and they gave you a. You get 500 miles a month on your truck.

Speaker 2: 28:41

Yeah, lots of sky miles, yeah, but no, it's a challenge and a blessing. You know, I have the kind of a unique position of working with just a huge variety of crops.

Speaker 1: 28:54

Right.

Speaker 2: 28:55

You know from yellow peas. It's part of my heritage. By the way Just a little funny side here I'm a Swede, so I grew up Swedish. My mom was still fluent in Swedish when she died. But one of our traditions was yellow pea soup, really, especially during the winter, and we would get whole yellow peas out of Canada Right To make that soup with Well, now with agri-liquid. Now I'm up in Canada working with that crop Really Yellow peas as a crop, so it's kind of come full circle for me.

Speaker 1: 29:26

What's the variety of crops you have to deal with?

Speaker 2: 29:29

Well, all the small grains, Right, you know so. Barley malting, barley, spring wheat, durum wheat, right malting barley, spring wheat, durum wheat, all the varieties of wheat, triticale for forage grass haze, you know, the farther north we go the more challenging it gets, for alfalfa especially, although it is amazing how far north we can grow alfalfa up into Canada. But potatoes, you know you get into short season crops. So potatoes work, you know you get into short season crops.

Speaker 2: 29:57

Right, right, so potatoes work well. Up there, the southern plains region of Canada, the vast Canadian prairies, as it were, are a really great place to grow potatoes.

Speaker 1: 30:09

Right.

Speaker 2: 30:10

And so there's quite a bit of that up there, and I get into lentils and dry beans. Really, you know, pinto beans, black beans, Two of my favorites, several varieties of lentils, you know, yeah, canola, right, that's a huge one. Boy, you go up into Canada. You think it's amazing, middle of the summer, when it's blooming, the vast, you know, 5,000 acre fields of yellow, bright yellows, where it's just as far as you can see. It's beautiful.

Speaker 1: 30:44

I'm kind of an equipment dork. I love just driving different pieces of equipment, what's your favorite piece of farm equipment to drive.

Speaker 2: 30:47

Believe it or not, one of my favorite jobs in the entire world is planting corn.

Speaker 1: 30:52

Really.

Speaker 2: 30:52

I love running a corn planter.

Speaker 1: 30:54

Really.

Speaker 2: 30:55

Yeah, there's just something about it.

Speaker 1: 30:57

I'll tell you they've gotten so big. I talked to a guy. Well, I'm not saying necessarily.

Speaker 2: 31:01

It would be my favorite now running a 36 row. You got to be pretty smart to run one of those. Oh yeah yeah, my hair's getting pretty gray. That would be a big challenge, but no, the bottom line is I just have always loved planting corn. Yeah, I like planting any crop, but corn in particular just gave me a lot of respect.

Speaker 1: 31:17

You know, we don't plant with a drill, we plant, we actually work soil. We use a vertical tillage tool to kind of put a nice thin layer, plant a seed bed, okay, and then we airflow. Oh sure, we airflow our alfalfa on with potash, or, yeah, usually potash as a carrier, yep. And then we come back with a cultimulcher and roll over it, yep, and we've had really good luck doing that.

Speaker 1: 31:43

Right and true method. Yeah, and it seems to be easier than drilling, maintaining the drill and the depth and having the right moisture content in the soil. We can be a little bit more varied in wind and Sure, you know, and the speed of it I mean good Lord know. And the speed of it, I mean good lord. They can airflow it on the way. If there's 120 foot airflow, they could be in and out of an 80 acre field in 30 minutes well and early in my career.

Speaker 2: 32:02

Sometimes guys would try doing that with spinner type dry fertilizer applications and yeah, that never worked very well because that small seed, you know, just wouldn't carry out from the spinners very far right. These air flows now are very concise.

Speaker 1: 32:17

Right.

Speaker 2: 32:17

GPS guidance. You know we don't get the overlap or the skips and it worked really well.

Speaker 1: 32:22

What we ended up doing. We did one field this year with a spinner type truck and they set up a pattern. They set up all the boxes and made sure all the seeds are falling there. But we did a dual pattern. So they spread at half rate but covered the field twice, doing multi. You know multi pattern. So they spread at half rate but covered the field twice, doing multi. You know multi pattern. So it'll be interesting to see how that field comes up this year.

Speaker 2: 32:41

Yeah, yeah, that'll make it better.

Speaker 1: 32:44

Yeah, Not as good as an air flow. No, we tried it. We tried it a couple of years ago with with not only alfalfa but a grass seed, and so we got striping because of the the different gravities of the seed, Absolutely so it was kind of weird. It was an interesting looking field.

Speaker 2: 32:58

Well, you know, going back to grass hay, you know, and it's a little bit of a it's a crop that I, you know, over the course of my career I've seen grass hays neglected from a nutrition standpoint and a management standpoint, probably more than any other crop. You know, I have seen it a lot out on the Great Plains, where guys will have permanent pasture and never fertilize. Well, the universities haven't helped us in that situation. When you know, when you've had these land-granting, universities have traditionally said it's not worth fertilizing permanent pasture. But we have found that even small amounts of agri-liquid out there as a foliar will make those pastures pop and we can double the production. And that doesn't sound feasible until you realize that because they have never been fertilized or they've been dramatically under-fertilized for years or decades, they're not producing much. So it doesn't take a lot to really increase that production.

Speaker 2: 34:03

Take it back in, exactly right.

Speaker 1: 34:06

Well, we see that with guys, especially as you go south of where we are, you get down into the rolling hills and more of the more difficult terrains. They graze cattle on it year after year after year after year, and there's no fertilizer. Now they'll fertilize their hay fields, but their pastures get neglected, right, and you see some of the guys around here starting to do what we do, which is a rotational grazing. So we rotationally graze our cattle, so we always give that ground. It gets eaten down to where you know, about three to four inches and then they're off of it and that plant gets rejuvenated, right, and with the agri-liquid product we sprayed it on. That we did, I showed you that test we did on that 30 acres over there. Uh, where pull our, pull our fences up, run over it, spray it doesn't hurt the animals, not going to hurt them, you know.

Speaker 1: 34:52

wants it to dry you know, now we left them off of there, for I think the next time they were back on was a week. That plant had the time to ingest that.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Yeah, yeah, Right, that's a little interesting side issue. I do get that question quite a bit oftentimes from smaller producers that are running 10, 15, 20, 50 cows on relatively small acreages. How can I fertilize this without endangering my cows? And you know my response is, as long as you've given that, I'll speak for agri-liquid, not other liquid products because I can't represent them. But from agri-liquid standpoint I'll probably give about 90% of my product into the plant within 24 hours.

Speaker 1: 35:41

Really yeah.

Speaker 1: 35:43

So what we did is we left it off several days because I, you know again new farmer, not very smart you know we would fertilize it and then we could walk our, because we just use a single line fence to separate them as they're rotationally grazing through there and we have a we call a central hub that has our waterers and then we you know we've talked about spreading our mineral feeders out but pull our fences down takes an hour, run over it, spray it takes an hour and then our fences can go right back up and then that's ready.

Speaker 1: 36:09

The next time they come out of that next paddock they go into one, that one that's been fertilized, and you can see I mean you can see a distinct difference of that field, run right down the fence line. You know where one side got nothing. It didn't get treated. Now it was fertilized in the fall, but you can see how fast it got beaten down and how unresponsive it was. Coming out of the drought, those plants that had, where those roots had built up a little bit of reserve, a little bit of extra strength, came out of the drought ready to go.

Speaker 2: 36:40

Right.

Speaker 1: 36:41

And we saw that with the alfalfa too. Even during the drought, we'd have new sprouts coming up within a day, a day or two, you'd start to see that green start to come back, and once we got that rain after we went through the drought, it was like an explosion.

Speaker 2: 36:56

Yeah, you know, in agriculture none of us are very smart, john, no matter how long we've been in it, because agriculture is going to keep teaching us lessons, right? Yeah, you know, we get to a point where we think we've seen it all, never have seen it all, because we're always getting thrown curveballs, right. So if there's a career out there to keep you humble, it's agronomy. I'll be the first to admit that, you know. You can't be a know-it-all and be an agronomist. It doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 37:24

Man, don't tell some of the farmers I know, man, some of these guys are smarter than you know they'll tell oh, this is what you do, you got to do this and you walk right. Mother nature comes in and says nah, I don't think so.

Speaker 2: 37:35

Yeah, so you know, one of the things it's kind of a given.

Speaker 2: 37:40

Sometimes there's things that you assume in agriculture that become just assumed knowledge, even though you maybe haven't actually experienced it yourself.

Speaker 2: 37:54

But you hear and one of those is from a foliar standpoint is if the crop is under stress, if it's under drought stress, don't bother putting any foliar nutrition on it, right, because it's not going to absorb it, it's under stress, not going to be able to use it. Well, I'll accept that, maybe as a general rule of thumb, right. But again, agronomy teaches lots of lessons and sometimes it'll teach lessons that you don't see coming, and one of them was out in North Dakota, actually in Manitoba. Okay, so we have an agri-liquid dealer there and the owner of this agri-liquid dealership also has a personal family farm, right, and part of that farm is irrigated, part of it isn't, and he's selling agri-liquid, so he's also using it on his own farm, which is actually a quite large farm, and so on the part of the farm that's pivot irrigated, you have these corners right that the pivots don't get deep, and he's got some 160-acre pivots. So some of these corners are quite large.

Speaker 1: 38:58

Right right.

Speaker 2: 39:00

So he's one of these guys that I'm selling the product. I want to see it work on my own operation, which is great you talked about.

Speaker 1: 39:08

That's how we got. That's how we got into it.

Speaker 2: 39:19

That's why I'm an agratimus for agri-liquid, because I see with my own eyes, you know, and I can do my own field research, which has been awesome. But so dry years this goes back maybe three years ago. They were pretty significant drought and he had some leftover. It was a blend, our Shirke, I think there was some furthering in it, uh, some pro germinator, and the corners were had basically gone dormant because of the drought, and alfalfa will do that.

Speaker 1: 39:46

Right Lack of water.

Speaker 2: 39:47

Right. So there was one corner, he thought probably about four acres worth. He drove up, made a boom, pass across it, um, just basically empty out the rest of this product and finish up. It was about a week later, maybe 10 days later, and he got a call from one of his farmhands. He said hey, what did you do in that corner? He had a name for that particular pivot, you know. Hey, what did you do in the corner on, you know, pivot number 12? And Ray said well, I just went across it with the foliar blend I'd been using. And he said why? He said you need to come out and see this, even though ostensibly that alfalfa was dormant, right, Right.

Speaker 2: 40:33

Still dry. Hadn't rained in the meantime, but there was new growth on it.

Speaker 1: 40:38

Really when he had sprung. Came out of dormancy, Didn't?

Speaker 2: 40:41

yes.

Speaker 1: 40:42

Well, it got enough nutrients to pop a little bit.

Speaker 2: 40:44

Yeah, exactly, there was a visible response to that fully nutrition, even though there shouldn't have been, inventional wisdom would have said no. And then, when he did get rain later in the fall bang, that strip really took off.

Speaker 1: 41:02

Well, I think we saw. You know, one of our ways of thinking was when we were putting down our fertilizer and our you know, our agri-liquid products. Putting them down is that drought. If you farm alfalfa in Illinois, there's no crop insurance. That drought. If you farm alfalfa in Illinois, there's no crop insurance. None, yeah, and it's just.

Speaker 1: 41:19

I mean you might as well go to Atlantic City and throw some money down, but the thing that you can do to prepare for droughts is make sure that your plants are as healthy as possible. So when we went, I think it was close to eight weeks yeah, it was close to eight weeks with no rain. The minute that rain came now there was one field. I showed you that field that's not in the, it's a more traditional alfalfa that didn't get treated. The field across the road treated that field across the road. When we got that rain exploded. I mean, alfalfa was 12, 16 inches high in a matter of almost no time and the field that didn't get fertilized didn't get the same program might've made it to six inches. I mean massive, massive difference in yield by making sure that plant was ready to accept that challenging condition.

Speaker 1: 42:10

Dan, it's been great having you on the podcast. Man, when you're back down we'll do it again because you and I have so much in common with the music and stuff that's been fun all day. I gotta say it's been what a wonderful day just going around talking about the two things that I'm really passionate about yeah, including including music.

Speaker 2: 42:27

That was such a surprise. When I walked into your office I thought, oh my gosh, look at the keyboard, look at the stereo system, oh my gosh, and yeah, uh, gold records on the wall, yeah, stuff that you've produced, and it's like wow, instant connection. But it's fun.

Speaker 1: 42:40

Man. Well, it's good talking to you. Thanks all for watching. We'll catch you on the next one.