Field-day interview (AEA Texas Field Day) with Speaker A and farmer Mike Thompson discussing regenerative practices on a corn field following a cotton treatment the prior year. They report low-input corn performance attributed to prior-season AEA treatments (soil primer, foliar treatments, end-furrow at planting) plus rotations and cover-cropping; SAP (sap) analysis showed unusually high calcium and improved micronutrient levels likely carried over from cotton, informing the decision to skip foliar treatments. Farmer history: took over farm in 2017, adopted no-till in 2018, and began implementing AEA protocols recently.
Questions this video answers
50 units of nitrogen after planting, plus 50 units worth of compost (counted together as ~100 units).
Took the farm over in 2017; implemented no-till in 2018.
Chapters
So what we want to look at here is we're capturing. And so this is Mike Thompson's field of corn. We had a full cotton treatment here last year. So that included the soil primer, two foliar treatments, I think last year. Go ahead. Yeah. End furrow at planting time to get the crop started, and then two foliar treatments. And so the significance of that and why we wanted to look at this cornfield is this is for the area and for the season. For a grain crop of corn. This is a pretty good crop of corn with minimal input in this season. How many units of nitrogen?
50 units after plant, and then 50 units worth of compost.
If we count the compost, 100 units. Arguable how much of that to count in this season. But anyway, what we saw in the saps, which is what was most significant and why we wanted to come look here, is that traditionally, particularly on some fields that we treated in the past, even on Mike's farm, our nutrient profile of micronutrients has not been very good. And our calcium has really challenged. Has been challenging to get the calcium into the plant that we want to see. So one of the things that we're learning as we are actually able to look at saps and really understand how the soil is relating to the specific crop that's being grown, that's helping us learn how to manage those things is that cotton does an amazing job of getting calcium into the plant. And then we're seeing it's making that calcium available to a subsequent crop. And so what we saw on the saps in this field was that we actually had micronutrient levels and calcium. We had calcium at an unusual level compared to what we have seen. And I think that contributed to our other micronutrients being at least in the above average, not necessarily completely into the range that we wanted, but far above the almost non existent that we've been seeing. And so we opted to not really spend a lot on it and not make any foliar treatments, just see how the crop continued to perform. And as I said, it's really pretty minimal input. And we're attributing a lot of that to the treatments that we made last year that we're carrying over, you know, and, and also, I mean, Mike's doing a lot of things with his crop rotations and with his cover cropping and the things to actually build that soil profile of biology and doing the management things to proliferate that biology over time. And so again, it's what we really want to focus on here is not how we micromanage this crop based on saps, but how we believe this crop is benefiting from pretty intensively managing the SAPs in the previous crop and how that's contributing to this one. So as we continue to learn more and seeing what happens over time, like we've experienced at some of Kelly's farms, that, you know, the biological proliferation over time, time is what we're really looking for. How do we best sequence that in our rotations or in our cover cropping to maximize what we're getting contributed to the soil so that the soil builds the resilience that we're looking for that will continue to contribute to the subsequent crops. That's a big, a great time to just spend a couple of minutes to cover what a SAP analysis. And the way that AEA has really helped to bring this technology into an understanding that's useful at the producer level is it's pretty profound what it can tell you when you do it correctly. And I know a lot of people are claiming to be utilizing SAP analysis that's really more like a, a petiole or a tissue analysis that's a picture in time rather than a real time, essentially blood sample. So the way that we're using SAP analysis is very much like a blood sample where we can actually see, based on the mobility of nutrients, how the plant is metabolizing, what it's being able to get from the soil, what it's moving within the plant, and therefore what we can adjust based on the deficiencies that we're seeing in the actual SAP. So that's what we use to gauge what the soil's ability to feed this crop is, is the SAP analysis.
I took this farm over in 17. My dad was traditional tillage. I implemented no till in 18. I actually had corn here in 17 I got held out. 18 had a heck of a cotton crop. 19 was a good cotton crop. And that's when I started looking into reducing synthetic fertilizers, getting away from the negative effects that those can have. Really started looking at the aea. Last year was a full year of implementing the AEA with the primer and everything. The cotton last year yielded about what everything else did, but it was different when we stripped, it was different. When it packed in the, in the module builder, it was different. The quality was, was different than everything else, even though the yield was about the same. So, you know, this year, this being.
Corn.
I've seen a benefit of last year's crop and the quality that this is and the limited amount of inputs I've had to put in this crop.
