Nutritional Management for Growing Pest and Disease Resistant Cotton

All right, Well, I want to be considerate of everyone's time, so I'm just going to jump into the conversation. Jarrett and Ethan, thank you for joining us. We have here on the call with us. I think many of you probably know Chad, who is our connection distributor in Texas, and Jason Stahl is the genie in the machine, our consultant from Indiana, who does a lot of background work and works with a number of growers ranging all the way from Saskatchewan to Arizona on quite a number of different crops. So I'd like to begin this conversation by just describing our understanding of plant physiology a little bit and how we think this applies to cotton. And let me say right from the beginning that we know nothing about cotton. So you think about that. Well, then why are we having a conversation about cotton? Well, I think it's worth us having a conversation about what we've learned about plant physiology as it relates to cotton because of the impacts that we've been able to have on other crops and their plants. And just to give you what I'm thinking about, about, I think it was 2013. We had a conversation with a hops ranch in Washington. I had a conference call. They had a bunch of SAP analysis data. And at the beginning of the conference call, I made a comment. I said, look, we don't know anything about growing hops. We've never worked with hops plants before. We have no idea what their nutritional requirements are, what diseases and insects they're susceptible to. I said, to the best of my knowledge, I've never seen a live hops plant in my life. And then we started reviewing the SAP analysis data, started looking at, and I started asking questions about their nutrient applications to be able to make sense of the nutrient fluctuations that we were seeing. And then about 20 minutes in, I was able to say, you know, again with the caveat that I really don't know what I'm talking about. I would expect that these plants, based on similarities with other crops, I would expect that these plants are probably very susceptible to spider mites, whiteflies, and powdery mildew. So there was dead silence on the phone for about 30 seconds. And then Mike Smith, the ranch owner, says that, well, you might know more about growing hops than we do because their three biggest disease and insect challenges were powdery mildew and spider mites and whiteflies. I was able to identify that accurately just based on looking on the plant SAP analysis data. So our history, our context as a company is that we've taken a very different approach to agronomy from the mainstream Our background, my personal background is growing up on a fruit and vegetable farm. And our history has been with fruit and vegetable agronomy. We're now beginning to work with much more broad acre crops. Corn, beans, small grains, etc. And the original claim to fame, when I first founded Advancing Eco Agriculture as a consulting company in 2006, and what we became very well known for was helping growers produce crops which were resistant to diseases and insects based on how we manage nutrition. So we've been able to grow crops that have no further susceptibility to spider mites or aphids or leaf poppers, etc. Just based purely on the plant's nutritional profile. And there's a tremendous amount of science behind how we accomplish that and the approach and the processes that we use. So essentially what happened is mainstream agronomy. The difference between our approach and the mainstream approach is mainstream agronomy focuses on highest yields possible. And we've taken a slightly more nuanced approach to say we want to balance plant nutrition to get the highest yields and the highest quality possible. How do we get the greatest level of disease and insect resistance? How do we get the ultimate in plant health? And by adding that modifier, that translated to looking at different ratios of desired nutrients and desired elements. And that led us to the reality is that when we started working with growers using this approach, we started observing substantial yield increases on tomatoes and soybeans and various different crops. It was not uncommon for us to get 10 to 20% yield increases, sometimes even 30% yield increases and higher. And then there's some really crazy stories about green beans were able to double the yield, almost triple the yield in a single year. That was an anomaly. So there's been some pretty extraordinary crop effects that we've learned about. So I've been speaking with Chad and with Jason and David and different people over the course last couple of weeks about cotton. We don't have historical experience with cotton, but I think we're going to be able to make a substantial difference with cotton production with one key characteristic, understanding of nutrients and how to manage nutrition to manage a plant's reproductive versus vegetative growth. So this is an understanding that has emerged over the last decade and half a million data points on SAP analysis and trying to think of how to jump in to describe this. Let's put it this way. There are some nutrients which drive a strong vegetative growth response. They will build a plant frame very rapidly and very quickly. And then there are some nutrients which have a strong Reproductive produce a strong reproductive growth response, they initiate blooming and blossoming, etc. And historically, within agriculture, we've sought to accomplish similar results by managing nitrogen and pgprs. Putting on PGPRS to limit plant growth, I think, is one of the common practices in action and to trigger bud initiation and so forth. This is, of course, there's a conversation about nutrients and how to manage nutrients. There's also conversation about plant hormones, cytokinins, auxins, gibralins, etc. First, I want to speak about the nutrients, because what has been possible for us when we manage these nutrient ratios of these reproductive versus vegetative nutrients, we're able to achieve very large plant biomass and strong reproduction at the exact same time. We don't have to constantly have this battle going on where we're trying to produce strong vegetative growth with nitrogen and then break it with pgprs. We can actually produce a much better plant response than that response simply by how we manage the ratios of a couple of nutrients. So what are these nutrients? There are four nutrients which drive very strong vegetative growth. One of them is nitrogen. You already know that you're using urea, commonly and perhaps other forms of nitrogen to drive a strong vegetative growth response. The second nutrient which drives vegetative growth is potassium. The third is chloride. The fourth is calcium. Now, the interesting part is that when you think about commercial production, agriculture, we commonly use nitrogen and potassium and chloride to get our growth responses. If you think about alfalfa production, alfalfa growers will put on potash, potassium, chloride, radiative potash, to produce a strong vegetative growth response. Corn producers, cotton growers, others will use nitrogen to produce a similar vegetative growth response. But the interesting part is that you can produce the exact same volume of vegetative growth, the same quantity of plant biomass, by using calcium to get some of that vegetative growth energy and substantially reducing nitrogen or potassium or whatever it is that you're using so you can produce the same amount of biomass and substantially reduce nitrogen or potassium or chloride. But there's something else that happens when you do this that is very important. First of all, nitrogen and potassium and chloride, all three of those nutrients have a synergistic relationship with the plant hormone auxin. So auxins are produced in the new shoot tips at the top of the plant as well as in the seed. So when you have this rapid vegetative growth, you have oxygen dominance, and that is going to lead to very long internodes spaced 4, 68 inches apart, depending of course, on genetics and the crop that we're speaking about. So when you, when you fertilize with nitrogen or potassium or chloride, you get a lot of vegetative biomass and it typically will have a long internode spacing. However, if you replace some of that vegetative growth energy that you're getting from nitrogen potassium with calcium, you get the same amount of vegetative energy and vegetative biomass with one distinct difference. Calcium does not have a synergistic relationship with auxin. Instead it has a synergistic relationship with the hormone cytokinin. So cytokinins trigger bud initiation, they trigger reproductive bud initiation and they end up producing plants with shorter internodes. So it's possible to produce the same amount of plant biomass, but have internodes that are half the distance apart than they are when you supply it, when you grow with nitrogen or potassium. This is actually something that's been very powerful on tree fruit production, on soybeans, on tomatoes, on almost all these multi fruiting crops. We've been able to grow tree fruit. We can manage the ratios of these nutrients on fruit trees to have the nodes be six inches apart, the spurs, which then eventually will end up later producing fruit, be 6 inches apart or be 2 inches apart. Well, when you have the same quantity of new growth and you have 18 inches of new shoot growth, but you have nodes that are in spurs that are 2 inches instead of 6 inches apart, that just means you've tripled your yield or your yield potential. The same thing can happen with cotton. It's possible to manage the ratios of these four vegetative nutrients to produce the same quantity of plant biomass, but at the same time produce very tightly spaced internodes and very strong reproductive initiation. So far I've only spoken about the four elements which drive strong vegetative growth. There are also a list, there's also a group of elements which trigger strong reproduction and bud initiation. And the reality is that it's everything except the four that I just mentioned. But there are three nutrients which have very strong, produce a very strong reproductive response. At the top of the list, kind of the king of the mountain. The nutrient that has the biggest, that produces the biggest plant response of all is manganese. In fact, manganese is so strong that when we're working with tomato growers, sometimes tomato growers either sometimes it has happened accidentally, sometimes intentionally, unknowingly, growers over apply nitrogen in the spring at planting and they end up with this tomato plant that is 4ft tall, is lush, beautiful, dark green. It's just a perfect wallow tomato plant. And it doesn't have a single blossom on it. That's a plant that's dominated by vegetative energy and doesn't have enough reproductive energy. Manganese applications are so effective that we can put on a foliar application of trace. We often put on a combination of seaweed and manganese and phosphorus. Phosphorus also has a strong reproductive effect, but much of the effect comes from manganese, where it's possible to paint a tomato crop yellow with blossoms in about 96 hours. From a foliar application of manganese and phosphorus and seaweed, which we eventually put together and put it together one package, one product package that we call Accelerate, which I think some of you may have tried this last year. The nutrient, the one trace mineral, which has a very strong reproductive response is manganese. The second nutrient, which has a big reproductive response, is phosphorus. And the third is ammonium. Each of those three elements, which I described, also triggers very strong bud initiation. And in our approach to agronomy, what we've sought to develop and work within different operations that we work with, many different crops that we've worked with, is to balance these four reproductive elements. We balance nitrogen and potassium and chloride with calcium. We want to get as much growth energy from calcium as we do from nitrogen and potassium. So this often means that we'll make recommendations for applications of. We think about calcium not so much as a soil amendment, the liming agent, or something like that, but we think of calcium as essentially almost as a fertilizer. Calcium has a similar. We think of calcium as having a similar effect to nitrogen when it's managed correctly. So we'll often make recommendations for applications of gypsum, a few hundred pounds per acre, either in fall or in spring, depending on the soil and what's happening, what's going on. And we think of that as a fertilizer source of calcium to give us the vegetative biomass and to give us the strong reproduction that we're looking for, and then to perhaps reduce some of the nitrogen applications and look at what the plant actually requires. So I think that then leads us to the final piece that I would like to mention is that at advancing eco agriculture, we have been been very richly blessed, very fortunate, and very successful. We have hundreds of growers who have been very successful that we really enjoy working with, that we've developed deep relationships with. And I think the foundational reason for our success on working with all the different crops that we work with across North America is that we don't assume that we know something that we don't know. I told you at the beginning of this conversation that we don't have a lot of experience with cotton. But there is one thing that we do and that is we do not guess. We measure everything. We measure what the plant's nutritional requirements really are. We measure how effective the plant is at absorbing nutrients from the soil profile. So one of the tools that we use a lot is plant SAP analysis where we actually measure the nutrients contained within the leaf SAP throughout the entire growing season. Technology that is extremely accurate, it's very sensitive. And it's also the technology that I referenced at the beginning of this conversation regarding hops production, where it is so accurate and so sensitive that we can actually predict disease and insect susceptibility based on a plant's nutritional integrity and its nutritional profile. So we don't assume that we know something that we don't know and we don't guess. We test, we measure, we measure everything. And I think with that introduction, I'm really excited about being able to work with cotton because cotton is one of these multi fruiting crops that blossoms and reproduces for an extended period. And I'll just give you an example of what we've been able to accomplish with a similar related crop by understanding these nutrient dynamics. Soybeans are also a multi fruiting crop. They also, like cotton, have the capacity to produce multiple pods per node, multiple beans per pod, etc. With soybeans, it's very easy to increase the pod count and the bean count per plant by 50 to 80%. It's very easy. But what isn't easy then on beans is actually translating that to increased yield. I can't even begin to describe how many farmers, probably dozens, actually, probably closer to hundreds. Certainly dozens of farms on a large scale that we've worked with who put on a foliar application of accelerate and increased pod count by 30 to 50% and did not get a single bushel of increased yield. Because for soybeans you then have to have the capacity to fill those beans. And if they didn't supply enough potassium and other nutrition later on, they simply ended up producing a much higher count of smaller beans or aborting and dropping some of those beans. The good news with cotton is that there is much less energy required to form and fill a ball than there is to produce and fill a bean pod. So when you trigger this much greater number of reproductive buds and a larger number of flowers and eventually cotton balls, there is Less energy required from the plant to fill that. And you don't have the potential problems with abortion to the same degree that you do with soybeans with other multi fruiting crops. So those are kind of the initial thoughts that I wanted to share and put out there for the conversation. I'd like to open it to David, Jason, Chad, three of you on the AEA team, do you have any further comments or thoughts that you'd like to share? Anything that I missed that is important to be a part of the conversation?

I think that's a very good overview, John, and I am right with you on as I, I always thought cotton was just kind of a, you know, a boring white crop. You know, when since I've, since I've learned the characteristics of the cotton plant, I have gotten really excited about the potential that we have to increase not only yields and I think exponentially on the yields, but I think also cotton, if I understand the plant correctly at this point, there's, there's a lot to be said about the growing degree days, which maybe Chad, you can touch on what I would like to really have happen. The rest of this call, John, is to hear from all of those who are growing or have grown cotton, the things that are very important and the things that they know that we may not know yet. Because I think knowing all those pieces of information is important as we determine what the biggest limiting factor is and also what the key goal is. You know, where can we make the biggest impact on the yield?

Yeah. Thank you, David. Chad, were you going to weigh in as well?

Yes. And let me preface it with having spent all of the years that I am so far in a cotton area and primarily my family's income being growing cotton historically, we do have a lot of experience. And really the thing that led me to being at this place in time and pursuing the things that you guys understand about other crops is that 20 years ago I on my own farm produced very similar yields with a completely different nutrition approach to what the norm was at the time. And so I say that to say I know that it's possible and I have had questions for the last 20 years regarding why that was and how to manage that more appropriately. Because the tools that we did not have at that point in time where SAP analysis to actually correlate what's taking place in the plant to the length of the nodes and the internodes and how many fruiting positions are being placed on that plant to really understand that rather than guessing and rather than being six weeks down the road and seeing that we were still too long in our, you know, in our fruiting buds and we, and we needed to apply heavier rates of PGPRs. And so that being said, you know what, what I gained from all of the research that I have done is that you guys have some tools and some understandings that are very applicable to understanding exactly what's taking place in the plant at specific points in time and how to better manage that so that you can see the, you know, see those things taking place throughout the season rather than waiting until the gin records come back to know what your yield and grades were. Because, you know, ultimately what, what all of us are up against in most cotton production areas is the length of season, how many heat units, growing days we get, you know, contingent upon weather as well as an open fall to actually mature all of the lint that has been produced and over. I think most people who have grown cotton can attest to. I remember when I was a child, we used to say that cotton needed to be blooming by third, fourth week in June, at least by July 4th. If you weren't really, you know, if you weren't in Full bloom By July 4th, you were behind. I mean, some of the old timers would say, you know, if you didn't get cotton up and going early so that it could be blooming by July 4, you might as well destroy it and start over because you weren't going to make good cotton. You might make some cotton, but you weren't going to make good, high quality cotton. And so we've spent a lot of time improving genetics and doing all kinds of things that we think are going to contribute to higher yields and higher quality. But are blooming season has continued to get further down the road. And so, you know, everybody's norm with these newer varieties is, oh, well, you know, they're, they don't bloom that early. You know, they stretch out and they do all of this other growth and then all of a sudden they start putting fruit on. Well, all of a sudden they start putting fruit on because we start really heavily applying pgprs and you know, but we're missing a lot of that growing opportunity to put on fruit and then mature that fruit earlier in the season. And I think that's an indication primarily of how much our soils have changed in regard to the nutrients that are available and how that plant is able to utilize those nutrients because of, you know, because of the things that have changed in our soils and over, over the same period of time. And so my point there Being is that I'm really enthusiastic about understanding those. Those dimensions and being able to measure those things, to know how to manage that throughout the season so that we're not missing out on growing days, because we know every time we shut the plant down to encourage a fruit burst, by shifting that energy, we're really not shifting the energy. We're really stopping the plant. We're causing a stress that then sends the plant into fruiting mode. And there are some estimates. I'm still pursuing the data. I don't have hard numbers, but there are some estimates by some researchers who are estimating that as many as four to eight days of growth are lost with each PGPR application, depending on the timing and how heavy that application is. Because that plant completely shuts down, it doesn't just stop growing vegetatively, it stops growing period. Well, when we're, you know, when our challenge, especially as we move north in the Cotton Belt, when our challenge is trying to maximize growing days and heat units to mature all of the length that we can, we can't afford to not have growing days in the season, especially early in the season when those heat units and growing days produce the most benefit. So, anyway, I'm really excited about, you know, learning a lot more so that we're not guessing so that we are measuring what is actually taking place so that, you know, we can. We can better manage the crop throughout the season and know how to make those adjustments.

Good. Thank you, Chad. So, to David's point earlier, I'd like to open it to the growers here on the call. Jarrett and Travis and Ethan, love to hear from you. Based on what we've described and discussed so far, what questions do you have? What comments do you have? What are your thoughts?

I think timing will be knowing when to apply the product that you're talking about. And it goes along with what Chad's talking about to maximize the time in the field for that crop. Because in the past, and all we're taught is to water it more, fertilize it more, and then. And then hit it with growth regulators to make it think it's dying so it'll reproduce. And to maximize that timing is critical, especially if we have an. If we had an unfavorable fall where these producers are still trying to get their crop out at Thanksgiving, if they can move that forward, you know, another. Another couple of weeks, that. That could be incredible.

Isn't that a bit like trying to hit the accelerator and the brake at the same time?

Very similar, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. So on the, just to speak, on timing and again, being unfamiliar with the cotton plant specifically, having not done the research to this depth yet, the moment where we can have the greatest impact on internode length and on producing reproductive buds is going to be during the bud initiation period. So it's usually much earlier than what most growers think of. So on a soybean plant, for example, when we're talking about the growers that have been getting these large increases in pod count, where they're getting 30 to 50% increase in pods, and that's a very common number, those applications are typically going on somewhere between the third and the fifth trifoliate. So these plants, these bean plants, are still quite small. They're only, depending on genetics, 1012 inches tall. So with a cotton plant, I would expect the approach that we would take would probably include three things. One is just. This is just based on the limited information that we have at this point. One is we would recommend reducing the nitrogen application rates early. And if assuming of course, that we have the capacity to apply later during the growing season and let's wait to actually apply nitrogen based on the SAP analysis data and based on what the plants actually tell us that they're requiring so that we're not over applying nitrogen, then we combine that with applying soil applications of calcium or making sure that there is enough calcium coming from the soil that might be in some of your soils or there might not be. Again, we'd have to test it and know for sure. But perhaps we put on a gypsum application or something like that at a few hundred pounds breaker to supply that push of calcium. So that would be steps one and two. And then step three would be a foliar application of the accelerate when. And this is me just guesstimating, but it's going to be early. I would say when the plant is at about 30 to 40% of its total frame that you want from the mature plant to be. That will be when you have the opportunity to proactively set a lot of reproductive buds as the frame continues to be built. So those are some initial thoughts in response to the question that you asked about timing.

Thank you.

Very good input. Thank you for contributing. Jarrett, Travis and Ethan, you have any additional thoughts or comments you'd like to contribute? I can't say too much. I'm kind of new to the whole thing. Also, I'm learning along with you guys. Good. I like the idea of applying the fertilizer and stuff instead of a bunch of weird hormones, but that sounds really good. Yeah. Here's the interesting part. When we think about plant hormones, we can buy concentrated or synthesized hormones in a jug, such as cytokines or auxins or. Or abscisic acid or whatever the case might be. We can spray it onto a plant, and the plants will respond accordingly. Or the alternate is that plants naturally produce these hormones themselves, given the proper nutrition, given the right enzyme cofactors. So when we speak about manganese and the importance of applying manganese, what's really happening is, is that the manganese is the key enzyme cofactor that is required for the plant to synthesize much higher levels of cytokinins and trigger strong reproduction. So we are affecting the plant's hormone balance by managing the nutritional balance. The same thing is true of managing calcium versus nitrogen. So we are, in effect, managing the plant hormones, but we're doing that by managing the plant's nutritional intake, which is great.

Yes. I'm way down in South Texas. We actually already have cotton up and growing right now. So it's a little bit different than the folks trying to harvest in the fall. We usually harvest them in July and August. But what I'd see, the biggest problem that we have is the irrigated cotton that we do have, that we flood irrigate. Usually when we're flood irrigating, all we're seeing is just a ton of blooms or bulls falling off at that time of irrigation. So, I mean, you see all the yield that's fallen off because the cotton potentially has the potential to make. But with the application of accelerate, are you recommending that we do not apply the plant growth regulators or lessen that?

We don't have enough experience to know for certain. So I don't want to guess. But based on experiences with other plants, with other crops where they do historically apply growth regulators, usually what happens is that once we kind of figure out the nutrition, are able to dial it in, then the application of the growth regulators is generally greatly reduced, in some cases eliminated entirely, but generally it gets cut back really significantly. So, but again, we. We have to. We have to actually apply the accelerate, see how the plants respond, and kind of have to figure it out. I don't want to assume that just because what we've seen happening on the plants would happen here as well, although I would be very surprised if it didn't.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah. All right, Well, I want to thank all of you for participating and for the discussion. Obviously, you have Chad in the local area who's working very closely with Jason, but I'm also available on call if you want to. I know this conversation, this recording is going to be made available. You can share it with other friends and people who weren't able to be on the call. And then if you want to have further follow up conversations in the future, you have more questions, you want to dive a bit more deeply into some of these topics. I'm happy to jump onto a conference call and answer any questions that you might have, and we can get a bit deeper into some of the applications and programs and any questions that you might have. All right. Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful day. Enjoy the sunshine. And just to help you enjoy it a little bit more, I need to tell you that it's snowing here in Ohio right now. All right, wonderful. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you.