https://www.listennotes.com/e/71a733d9a50543d0b160da0d8f2bbb88

Hi, friends.

Welcome, everyone. This is John Kempf. I'm here with a good friend and an AEA customer, Cole Nies. And we're just going to have a fun conversation around the work that's happening in the field, the experiences that Cole is having, some of the things that he's observed, and we're just going to have a fun conversation back and forth. So, Cole, tell us a little bit about what this season has been looking like. How are your crops looking? What's been going on?

It is very wet. We have had a ridiculous amount of rain, and things are having a hard time getting out of the ground.

So what. What crops are you growing? What are the crops?

So right now, we're still pretty much just corn and soybeans. We're doing a little bit of cereal, rye, and trying to get into some other crops, but for now, we're mainly just corn, soybeans.

And when you say corn and soybean have had a hard time getting out of the ground. What have soil temperatures been like? What has moisture been like?

Uh, I mean, it just keeps on raining. The. I mean, the ground is as saturated as it. As saturated as it can be without having water standing. And sometimes it's had water standing. And I mean, you know, the soil temperatures are low because we keep getting these cold rains. And. Yeah, the seed just wants to.

How long has that been true? I mean, my goodness. It's June 16th.

Over two months. That's. It's been rough.

And for people who are catching up. Where are you located geographically?

I'm in west central Indiana, kind of east of Terre Haute.

Okay. Yeah, I'll be out there at the end of this week in that general area. Jason Mox place.

Yep, I will be there as well.

All right, I look forward to seeing you there. Yeah, he's. He's also. He's been reporting a little bit on X on what he's seeing with all of the. The rainfall. And it'll be quite interesting to see what the wheat looks like at the end of this week if he ends up taking it off or not. With what he's doing with his relay cropping. I'm. I'm pretty intrigued to see what that looks like.

Yeah, that will be very interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, Cole, our historical experience has been that these. These biological. This biological. Biological approach to agronomy. Does it. It outperforms mainstream agronomy whenever there are extremes, when it's extremely wet, extremely hot, extremely dry, extremely cold, all those scenarios. There are. There are Big wins from the additional resilience. But the one that I think is probably the most difficult is extremely wet. Because biology does not like wet in soil. It's just there is a temporary shutdown when I actually think from what we've observed that biology continues to thrive more and better in soils that are frozen than they do in soils that are wet.

I would kind of tend to agree with that after some of my experiences last year. We were similarly wet last year and had some cover crop residues that we had a little too much biomass on top and kind of had a mud layer. We don't really have the infiltration and aggregation to get the water away from it yet. And had similar rains and after we planted and it was definitely pretty muddy for a long time and didn't dry out very well from that cover crop residue being a little extreme.

So in those environments, of course this can lead to compromised root development and not having great root systems later in the season. How do you compensate for that as. As the season goes along, as plants could grow later in the year?

I mean, I guess that's a good question for you. I think we helped it quite a bit with the foliars, but it was pretty rough not having that good early root development.

What responses have you observed from the foliar applications?

I mean, I can't say that we've seen just insane responses, but it seems like there's always a response to some extent. I, I had some trials out and didn't see huge yield differences necessarily last year, but last year was such a, I mean, such a rain out that it was really hard to get much data from last year.

Honestly, it's very common for us to a lot of these annual crops. If we put on a foliar application that's well designed, we get this photosynthesis bump. It's pretty common for us to see a root flush of, of expanded root growth. The question is just. And it can be quite significant. I've seen root biomass and double on a soybean crop that wasn't saturated. So I've seen the root biomass double in two weeks in the middle of beginning of June, even into, excuse me, beginning of July, even into the middle of July, which is quite remarkable. So usually at that stage you're at the bloom stage, your reproduction. You don't expect to see a flush of root growth at that stage. But that can happen and that's a lot of fun. So one of the things I wanted to chat with you about is I wanted to get some perspective on your Historical use of accelerate. I know that it's. Accelerate on beans is one of our. It's one of our more popular and more widely known applications just for the crop response that it produces. Have you been using that in the past?

Yeah, we have. And that is probably the biggest thing that I have seen a lot of results from. I mean, I had one time the. I mean, the pod count was close to double on some stuff that I had put accelerate on it, like R2 or so. And. Yeah, I mean, the.

That's surprisingly late.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, the pods just kind of exploded after that. There. There wasn't necessarily a huge yield bump, but I think that it was kind of low on K. Yeah. And I think it just had some, you know, pod drop, but it's very common.

I've. For years, I've said that putting on a foliar application of accelerate, getting 50 to 80% more pods on soybeans is. That's easy. That's like it's turning a dial. It's so consistent. Putting on that polar application of accelerated just does that consistently. But then you have to have enough potassium later in the season, or they just. Either they don't fill, you get more beans that are smaller, or they. You drop some pods, and you just. There's still that fill that has to happen later in the season. But, you know, if you think about what that means, 50% to 80% increase in bean count per plant, when you can succeed in closing on that and delivering on that, filling it all out to the end of the season, that's a significant yield bump.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing with last year. You know, we had that big bump in the pod counts, but then we had no rain in July and August to fill them. So that's. That was the big part of, you know, last year. Our yield was really limited by the amount of rain that we had. I feel like that was the main limiting factor was that we were so wet early, didn't have good root structure development, and then turned off so dry late that it was just kind of a lost cause.

Yeah. Yeah. And you also applied that at R2, which has me over here scratching my head a little bit.

It was a little late.

Have you ever. Do you have any experience with applying it earlier?

No, not yet. I'm gonna do that this year.

But what application rate did you apply at R2? Now I'm curious, like, how much did it take to produce that kind of result?

I want to say that was three quarts per acre.

Okay. That's not bad at all. That's quite responsive.

Yeah. Yeah. It was one of those kind of whoa moments.

What did your overall rainfall in July and August end up being.

The. I mean, the middle of July, I want to say we got like two and a half inches or so and then no appreciable rainfall after that. It was like maybe a tenth here or there. That would keep the corn from curling for a day. It was. It was rough.

Yeah. Those sound like challenging conditions. What did your. What did your final harvest end up being?

I'd rather not save the yield, but it was pretty bad. It was the worst we've had in a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. Those are some challenging conditions. My goodness. So what are you going to be doing differently or what do you hope to do differently in the future?

Have better weather? Yeah, I mean, that we learned a ton last year and. And just kind of building off of those things that we learned and moving forward this year and hoping for a lot better outcome.

Accelerate has this historical pattern. I mean, it's. It's one of our most popular applications. Because you can put on this foliar application. There's a lot of plants. It responds. Soybeans respond very strongly. Tomatoes, cotton responds very. Basically any crop that blooms and pollinates for an extended period. So that. That kind of. We don't get similar responses or not as consistent responses with corn and small grains and so forth. But for these crops that bloom and flower for an extended period of time, we tend to get these very large crop responses. With Accelerate. What other things have you done or have you worked with or observed or you've observed a similar response, Similar degree of response.

Just as far as responses from foliar.

Applications, foliars or seed treatments or anything else that you've tried besides drain tile and irrigation.

So we had a huge response last year from biocoat Gold. We had some corn that we did a trial and it was in our conventional system and it was biocoat gold versus no biocoat gold. And we didn't get a scale cart or anything like that to be like perfectly accurate. So I wouldn't say that these are perfect numbers, but we had something around a 13 bushel response according to the yield monitor. Obviously it's not perfectly accurate.

Was that across multiple fields?

So that was just in one field. The. We didn't really do a whole lot of replications, so that was just one field. But yeah. And going off the yield monitor, like I said, so it's not great data, but that's just what we've seen. And we went, oh, we're going to put Biocoat Gold on everything.

Yeah, yeah, we've actually, I guess I had Joe on the podcast earlier this year. But what we've seen so far, Biocoat Gold is, is producing those. That level of yield result 5 to 15 bushels an acre, pretty consistently, about 80 to 85% of the time.

Yeah.

Depends a bit on region. Some regions is actually higher than that. I don't. I haven't seen any regions yet where it's less than that, which is. It's quite remarkable for a biological.

Yeah, yeah. And that was an extremely stressed field. I mean, the, the overall yield was really low, so then that. That much response was even bigger of a deal. But it. Yeah, it was a field that was planted late and had all the stress in the world. So, yeah, I think the mycorrhizae really helped with that.

Yeah, it's a challenging environment. So what questions do you have for me? What, what problems would you love to get solved?

I mean, this year there have been a couple times when I wanted to pull SAP while it was raining. Is that something that you can do without causing issues or is that a bad idea?

It's been done. The. I don't have a ton of personal experience with it. I would say I would be more open to it on larger leaf crops, which you're doing fairly good with the corn and soybeans, but we've had situations where it was just wet for an extended period or where there was a heavy dew in the morning and just consistently when they're pulling out, pulling samples. And so the common protocol is to. To layer the leaves in with paper towels and to just layer them in with paper towels for as you're in the collection process and as you transport them back to the office or wherever your shipping destination is, shipping location is. And just to. To dry them out as much as possible and to get the moisture off the leaf surface as much as possible. So even with that, I have this. I mean, it seems you could expect that there might be some slight variation in nutrient and in nutrient levels that you might get a little bit of water into that sample. But so far we haven't. I'm not aware of any significant data variation coming from that. So that's the way a lot of growers are doing it.

What about. So, like, I'm. One of the things that I really have trouble with in the regenerative program is figuring out how and when to do herbicide. What is the, like, the most and least damaging stages on corn and soybeans to do herbicides as far as for them to be able to metabolize that and not have it affect your yield and things as much in your biology?

I don't know the answer to that question, Cole.

Probably there's no good time.

Well, I'm sure there probably is a better time and there probably are better modes of action than others, but I've not focused deeply on understanding how those various modes of interaction interact with the plant's metabolism and what the ideal times would be. I mean I. The, the zones in the, in the case of a corn plant, the, the time periods when you can mess up or have the greatest impact on reproduction is between germination and, and what is it? V6. I think that's when you have the most potential negative impact. But the question is, can you rely all on pre emerge and, and after that application or what impact does pre emerge have during that time period? I, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. You know, it's. It's interesting to me when I had Frank Dean on the podcast and what I've learned it. It's in when it's possible. I like to see foliar applications of nutrients being mixed in the same spray tank with the herbicides. It's known quite well that in the case of Roundup, for example, if you can, if you can apply a chelated manganese, cobalt, zinc, etc. In the same tank, mix with the glyphosate or shortly thereafter, if you do, if you're making two passes, you can do it shortly after. And there is no question that there are significant positive crop responses from that because the glyphosate will strip out some of those elements from the crop which you are then immediately replacing. And there are observable yield responses and quality responses from that. The question is just what are the nutrients that other herbicides are impacting and can we mitigate that by combining an herbicide application with a nutrition application? And I would suggest that's probably the way we need to be thinking about it.

Yeah, I had wondered about that. I mean it sure would be convenient to do foliars with the herbicide, but then you get into, you know, you know, the herbicide needs to be applied in the middle of the day. The foliar, it'd be better for it to stay liquid on the leaf longer. So how does that interplay work?

Well, there is. The key is that you want the, the droplet to remain liquid on the leaf surface as long as possible. And generally, I mean there is variation of course depending on the part of the country and everything that you're in. But the, those droplets will tend to remain liquid on the leaf surface much longer during the springtime when you're doing most of your herbicide applications in, in May and early June than they will in July and August and September. So I don't know, it is dependent. It's going to depend a little bit on your local context. It would be ideal I think to do an evening application, but also. Well, let me just ask you a question. Why is it ideal to do a midday application for early herbicides?

Well, I mean we're, we're mostly doing post emerge herbicides. So I mean as far as I've always understood, basically you want to have the sun dry that onto the leaf to get it to. I don't know, I guess thinking of thinking of it in a foliar context for best, best absorption then I guess it would make sense to do it where it would be on the leaf surface as a liquid longer. But. And I think it also is to do with. So like temperature inversions, you don't want to have drift issues and things like that. But. So that may be the main reason.

But yeah, I'm sure it probably depends on the formulation. You don't want volatilization.

Yeah.

And. And also there might be the concern that if it is liquid at still in the evening and you get dew formation, the dew might dilute that out and cause some of it to drop off your target, some of your target plants. And that could be problematic. So I could see that being a possibility.

Yeah, I mean generally we always wait to apply herbicide until the dew has completely dried off. And yeah, you know, we're done with an hour of sun to spare at least.

Yeah. It's been many years since I applied herbicides or even spent any time thinking about these types of applications.

So I would like to say the same but I'm not there yet. Not sure if I ever will be. But I reckon we'll see.

Well, I do expect that, I know that there's a fair amount of stuff in the pipeline. I expect in the next three to five years or less we're going to see just a wave of alternative herbicides come out of the marketplace. Now each one of the stuff that's on the marketplace, in the marketplace currently, they all seem to have their idiosyncrasies and they need specific application criteria in order to perform really well. But I do expect that technology to just Continue to improve and get better and better.

Really? Yeah, yeah, I know like there always is an old saying around here anyway that like stressing soybeans will make them yield better. Like so say a cobra application or something like that. I don't know if you've heard of cobra, but. And it will kind of curl the leaf and stuff and people say that that makes them yield better. Do you have any idea what that would be? I mean that's herbicide stress that you're placing on that plant, is that.

Yeah, yeah. I, I don't know anything about cobra specifically so. But I do understand the concept of, of stress having the capacity to increase yield. Well, it's what. Earlier in our conversation we spoke about Jason Mock on the upcoming field day at the end of this week. He's observed, not just he, but many people have observed stress responses from, from rolling soybeans at a certain stage or from kind of pushing them down and pushing them flat a little bit and that causing them to branch out a lot more and essentially inducing a form of stress. And some herbicides, particularly those that have a hormonal type effect such as even very light doses of 2.4D can have, can produce a similar response. And I don't have exact mechanisms or modes of action in my head right now to describe why that is, but it's, it's not, it's not uncommon for stress responses to produce increased yield in some of these multi fruiting crops. But now what is interesting and I think where I can add some value to the, to the discussion is that the degree of yield response from stress is a reflection of the plant's nutritional status. This, this one is one that we've become quite clear on is you can take two plants that are growing in apparently identical growing conditions relative to light and moisture and sunlight and, etc, and if you, if, if one field has a very, has much better nutrition than the others and they're stressed the same, the field with better nutrition will produce a significantly greater yield response than the field that doesn't have the same balanced nutrition. So I've, if, if you would have asked me the question, I don't know, 10 years ago, maybe even less than that seven years ago. My perspective, my opinion at one point was that if you want to produce the highest yields possible and the best quality possible, then we want to do everything we possibly can to eliminate stress. We want to have ideal growing conditions from a nutritional management perspective and from, from a stress perspective. And I no longer believe that to be true. I, I think that Perspective was mistaken. The, the concept of having ideal nutritional balance I think is still true. But then when you have that optimal nutritional balance, having targeted stress or specific types of stressors at specific stages of plant development can produce some significant yield responses. So and not just yield responses, but also quality responses. So in the case of vegetable crops, if you want to produce exceptional flavor and aroma, specific types of disease attack or insect attack that the plant has the capacity to overcome, actually increase the flavor profile and the aroma profile. So I think stress plus good nutrition can actually increase yields and increase quality.

Huh, that's interesting. Now, speaking of stress, when it comes to the nutrition, is there anything say like any certain nutrient that you could really focus on to sort of mitigate the water stress that we're seeing right now, like say as it, as it's e coating or anything else?

Well, this, this one, this is one of the very few, this is one of the very few scenarios that you will hear me provide a positive endorsement of nitrate. But nitrate nitrogen actually in, in when you have saturated soil conditions, when you think about nitrate being no. 3, it actually the, the contribution of nitrate actually contribute, contributes oxygen to the soil microbiome, to the root system and to the rest of the plant as well. And so small amounts of spoon fed nitrate can actually be very valuable in saturated soils.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

It'S one of the few places, it's essentially the places where nitrate makes sense is when essentially when you have extremes with the exception of extreme dry, so extreme wet, extreme heat and extreme cold, nitrate can have a positive contribution in small amounts spoon fed.

And how would you go about spoon feeding nitrate just.

Well, in the scenario that you're in where you have completely saturated soils right now, you really need a drone, don't you? Yeah, that's about the only way of getting it out there. Yeah, I'd foliar it on if, if I could. That'd be the idea.

Just with uam, I would probably use.

Just a straight calcium nitrate if I could get it. That would be the ideal.

I don't know anything about that. I've never used that before.

It's less commonly used on agronomic crops, it's more commonly used on the specialty crops. But it's produces a very nice bang crop response vegetatively. Vegetative growth and root flush development, which is something you pretty badly need.

Yeah, might have to look into that.

Yeah. All right. Any other, any other questions, any other conversations we want to get into?

I mean there's something I saw last Year that I was really excited about that I thought worth mentioning is soybean pod integrity in regenerative systems. So we had, it's kind of our full AEA program. It's hard to say that one application of something was what caused it, but on all of our regenerative soybeans last year, we had way more resilient pods. As far as they. Whenever I combine them, they didn't shatter. Nothing like the conventional side. I mean, I had fields that were right next to each other and a conventional and regenerative. And I could run a mile and a half faster in the regenerative stuff without, you know, flinging beans everywhere. You know, any of us who have harvested soybeans know what it sounds like when you fling beans onto the window with the reel. And it just, I mean, the pot integrity was altogether, it was very noticeable that the pods were staying together and going in the combine. And we kind of chalked that up to thinking that maybe that was better cobalt levels and possibly copper also. But that was really interesting, something that I didn't expect to see that it really made a difference at harvest.

Were there any, were there any differences in moisture levels?

No, there. I mean, I guess you could say that there was because of the rye mulch that was on the regenerative side. But I mean, it was the same field side by side.

But what about, do you think, Were there any differences in the harvest moisture and grain moisture levels when you harvest it?

Oh, no, it was the same.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's not. Yeah, thank you for describing that. That's not an uncommon phenomena where it also holds true for small grains as well. Where, when you start addressing some of these trace mineral metals, the, the pods don't. The pods will still split open when they are completely dry. You reach a dryness point where that is going to happen. But the pods tend to stay closed, they tend to not shatter, they tend to not drop off. They just. Everything holds together a lot better with good nutrition until full ripeness. You still get to a stage with full ripeness where, you know, it's just, it's what happens naturally. So. Yeah, but. Yeah, that is, that's. That's good feedback. Interesting to hear that. And you, you observed that. Was that with your first year of applications.

Yeah, that was our first year of regenerative. On, on those fields that were side by side.

How many, how many foliar applications had you applied?

2.

So one with accelerate and what, what else?

I'd have to go look back, I believe that we did one of macro pack and I think it was macro. We were a little too like trying to be prescriptive last year and so it was very custom blends to each field and it was a little overwhelming this year I'm simplifying things quite a bit and just kind of sticking with more of a standard program. And if we get the SAT back in time to throw something special in there, then that's great. But it. I have a hard time telling you exactly what we put in each foliar last year because it was so specific to whatever the SAP said.

Yeah, got it. All right, well I look forward to having a follow up conversation with you in about another three months or so and hopefully it dries out a little bit, but not too much.

Yeah, as long as the rain doesn't completely shut off like last year, we should be okay.

But yeah, and you're able to get some foliars out there, maybe an accelerate foliar a little bit earlier than R2.

Yeah. Hopefully here in the next week or so actually.

And then if all, if all those stars align and if all those things come to pass, we'll be able to talk about saving yields. By the way, are you. You're not going to to treat all of your beans with accelerator, are you?

I. Yeah, I'm planning on leaving plenty of check strips this year.

Right, Good. Just checking.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Very good. Thank you, Cole.

Yep. Thank you.

Have an awesome day.

Yeah, you too. It was awesome being here.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze. And we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.