A Million Dollar Day On The Farm

good morning everyone and welcome back to the channel today we're going to be doing a little bit of shop talk a little bit of crop talk and a lot of different things in between before we get too far along make sure you like the video and leave a comment down below it is one of the easiest and cheapest ways you can support the channel so go down there real quick smash that thumbs up and leave me a comment say hi ask a question whatever you feel like i am tremendously appreciative of all of you tuning in and continuously watching the channel so thank you very much oh before i completely forget i am also laying the groundwork right now for some merch for the channel it is going to be some sweet gear so make sure you're following us on instagram and facebook that way you don't miss out when we drop it let me tell you guys something it is so hot outside today here in central illinois well actually it's been pretty hot for the last two or three days i spent about three hours yesterday out in soybean fields taking tissue samples that way we can get a little bit of a nutrient analysis from our plants and let's just say by the time i was done for the day you could have rung the sweat out of my shirt and filled up a bucket i know that's gross but that's just how hot and sticky it is outside right now absolutely miserable day to be working outside but what's bad for us is good for the plants i'm just gonna go ahead and disappoint you all right now none of that new fancy john deere equipment's here at our farm yet it's all been delivered to the dealership it's just not set up so we haven't taken delivery to our farm don't worry though in just a few short weeks we'll have some nice new pieces of equipment here in the barn to show off to all of you not that john deere equipment really needs showing off i mean look at that green and yellow self advertising it is so pretty water temp will literally grow anywhere all over the place in other news we finally took some initial steps towards beginning our harvest prep work we drug our oldest draper out of the barn probably the next week or two we're going to give it a look over see what it needs to be running here in four or five weeks won't be too long before cutting beans we'll talk about that a little bit later in the video we also won't have that much maintenance to do here before we get out and harvest because a lot of our equipment's going to be new this year this draper right here 630 fd is going to be our oldest implement we're running this year and i think it's about eight or nine years old it's done a tremendous job cutting beans for us in that short amount of time been extremely reliable those of you who were here at the beginning of last fall might remember me replacing the cutter bars on both our drapers and if my memory serves me correctly i think the weather was about as miserable as it is today to be completely fair though i'm not in the best of shape right now so i have an added layer of insulation on me which does not help when it's this warm outside we've also started piling some lime over the last two weeks just a little pile right there the pile definitely looks a little bit more sizable when you're up close and personal just shooting from the hip here i'd say this is about 150 tons of agricultural limestone it's only maybe 10 percent if not less than 10 percent of what we're going to need this fall to use as a soil amendment this product will be applied to reduce the acidity of our soil i'm not really going to talk about it today i just wanted to show you the pile we'll cover it later on and really talk in depth about how it works out on our farm and why it's so important the trucking guy is going to be pretty busy here over the next month we need about 1800 more tons of lime which is about 90 loads i forgot to mention that we have been in the initial stages of considering trading the 630 fd for the newest series i don't know the name but a 35 foot flex draper the massive obstacle we're running into though like a lot of other pieces of equipment and the newest stuff we've ordered is that our local john deere dealership is waiting on 25 new drapers to be delivered before this harvest if i were a betting man i'd be willing to place my money that every farmer in central illinois or at least the southern part of that region will be cutting soybeans here in five to six weeks for this deal to work financially for us and for our john deere dealership they need to move this 630 fd to the new customer before we got the new head and we just can't afford to let it go unless we have a new one on the way and it's not looking like there'll be any here for us to use the boss came to check on me he's getting a little antsy today his nerves today are pretty easy to comprehend at 11 am central the usda is releasing another wasde report a world supply and demand i've mentioned a million times like beating a dead horse how important supply and demand of grains are to the overall price really that's just simple economics in about every industry supply and demand are one of the biggest factors for the price of that commodity it's incredibly hard to predict what these numbers are going to be no one really has a good crystal ball to see what the usda is going to come out with in terms of final numbers global consumption of grains can be really high they could come out low u.s exports should come out low there's all sorts of different things that can affect this then you go and exponentiate the difficulty of this prediction by adding in the projected yields across the country that is really the great question this year no one knows exactly what the yields are doing by the time you account for the western corn belt in their struggles you balance out the eastern corn belt in their successes it's really hard to tell where the yield is going to be at are we going to be at the trend line yield above the trend line yield or below now as a farmer you're almost always hoping for below the trend line yield because that should take those prices higher one of the really unfortunate truths about farming is that what's bad for farmers across the country is really good for you if they have a bad crop and you have a good crop you're going to be financially benefited and the opposite is also true i know that some of you aren't super interested in the marketing side of farming but for those who are we are going to kind of follow a little bit it won't take long if you're not interested just skip ahead like two minutes or a minute and 30 seconds i don't know sometimes i can be a little long-winded if you didn't know this right here is the december 2021 corn futures contract this is what we're going to be watching because it is the new crop corn contract the december 2021 corn contract also called zcz 2021 is essentially the new crop corn contract that represents all the corn that's growing out in the fields right now for this next marketing year not the old crop corn that's still in bins which there's not very much left of what's really important about this contract is it shows our supply and demand going forward and really the price sentiment for that now the report is due out any minute we've been trading in this range pretty much all morning this is the one minute chart and that is about the 550 force range once the report comes out you will recognize pretty quickly how the market reacts it comes out at 11 a.m and it is 11 am so let's see what happens all right it's a little bit past 11 and let's see how the markets reacted oh whoa oh wow got about a 30 cent gain there we're at 554 and we're at 581 right now so we're actually about four minutes after the port because i haven't set so each one of these lines is one minute a 25 cent jump here on new crop corn is massive on a 200 bushel corn crop 25 cents is 50 an acre if you have a thousand acres of corn that's fifty thousand dollars it's not a laughing matter marketing is so important and so crucial to a farming operation let's dive into the numbers really quick this chart right here is courtesy of karenbraun on twitter she has a lot of great resources for markets and agricultural in general so give her a follow if you're interested in this type of stuff the funny fact about twitter is a lot of times you can get this data faster on there than you can by actually going to the usda website and finding it yourself this right here is the meat and potatoes of a report the two essential numbers to compare are these right here the trade which was the futures market as a whole was predicting 177.6 bushels an acre production projected yield however the national survey system i'm not actually sure what that stands for they came out with a number of 174.6 which is three bushels lower than what the trade was expecting and you come over to this column which is total production that is 250 million bushel difference just picture 250 million bushels and you'll see how drastic of a change that is percentage-wise it's not massive because we do produce almost 15 billion bushels of corn which is impressive within itself what's more significant though is compared to july we are about 400 million bushels shy of where we are this time last month the numbers on the soybean side aren't near as drastic four tenths of a bushel really isn't that large of a decrease that is still a bullish number the price of soybeans is up about 18 cents per bushel right now an 18-cent move in soybeans is nothing like an 18-cent move in corn 18 cents in soybeans right now is a little bit more of a percent of an increase 18 cents in corn though is a little bit over three percent one last quick look at the corn market we're trading at 584 and a half right now down a little bit from the high still floating about 30 cents up so it's a pretty significant move in the corn market and it has a big impact on new crop corn and farmers profitability some of you may disagree but i personally think that grain marketing is the hardest part about farming a lot of people are tremendous farmers they make great agronomic and timely decisions for their crops they produce good yields you can grow all the crops in the world but if you can't capture the highest peak of the market or the highest percentile of the market in terms of price you can't be as profitable as some other people and that's why marketing really sets apart good farmers from great farmers now i'm not going to say we're perfect by any means in terms of our marketing ability we have a lot of falls and shortcomings but there's a lot to be learned by following the stuff and being a student of the markets even with these above average commodity prices right now marketing is as important as ever not only are grain prices above average fertilizer and other input expenses has followed suit and they are way up as well if you want to capture the most on your farm ground this year and every other year you have to make the right calls and you have to be a winner at the marketing game which isn't easy to do if you have any questions or want to leave any input on this type of stuff make sure you drop a comment down below we're going to venture out into some of our earliest planned fields of soybeans and kind of get an idea of how our crop looks now i warned you earlier it's extremely hot very humid today i think the heat index is close to 110 degrees so we're gonna have to do some very necessary things to get by sunglasses are also a necessity today if you could all say a quick prayer for me that i make it back out of the soybean field that'd be great who knows what's going to happen with this heat may not make it very far also make sure you stay tuned to the video i got something really neat i'm going to show you here in a couple minutes this field we're in right now are pioneer 31 a95 extend only soybeans they were the first fields we planted on april 5th which seems like ages ago at this point and they are also the shortest season bean we have so they will definitely be the first thing we harvest i'm willing to bet thousands of dollars on that one by no means has this growing season been a cakewalk for this pill of soybeans they saw multiple mornings of near freezing temperatures they've survived multiple hail storms and they've had their fair share of wind out here that really goes to show the vigor of most modern soybean varieties they are bred so much tougher than they were decades ago and all of those different seed treatments we layer on them really help protect them from other environmental stresses and disease pressure these beans look really good there's no shortage of pods when you consider the overall stand we have out in this field or the plant population the density of the individual plants has a lot to do with the number of pods a plant with less competition around it is going to put on more pots these beans have a ton of potential this plant right here there's a four bean pod there's another four bean pod a forbidden pod is usually a pretty good indicator of a high yielding environment not every plant's like that and obviously you have areas where two bean pods are on there in terms of the growth stage or the reproductive stage of these soybeans i'm gonna peg them at r6 r6 is classified by one of the pods on the top four nodes having a green seed that fills out the pod completely i don't even have to open these up to see that it's r6 just because the density of that pod indicates that it's full of seed the next stage which is r7 is really the sign of maturity beginning that would be when any pot on the plant reaches that brown final color these pods are definitely developing a darker color which means they're very far along i think r7 is right around the corner but they're not quite there yet there's still a lot of filling out to be done in this field a lot of yield is still on the table four bean pods aren't really anything incredibly special or unique by any means however you can find a five bean pod out in the field or at least i've been told that i've never seen one with my own eyes but supposedly it is possible and i think if you have five being pods out in the field you're in great shape i've scouted a lot of beans on my time on the farm and i've never once seen those the crucial part about this growth stage of soybeans and into maturity is how well they fill out these pods or how much weight they pack into each seed what is really important for soybeans versus corn is that they get rains in august a good rainfall in august is usually coined the million dollar rain because it can have a massive impact on yields and soybeans last year we didn't have any rain from mid july to about september end of september so it was essentially a drought from that period and i think we left probably 10 bushels of beans on the table i can't necessarily complain about our soybean yields last year we were kind of in that 70 to 80 bushel range however if we could have just gotten one small measly little one-inch rain in august we probably would have been looking at 80 to 90 bushel beans that's how important that august moisture is these soybeans cannot put the roots down very far so once that topsoil is dry they're in trouble i really try not to guess any solid numbers for soybean yields because you can really get your heart broken i like to set the bar low i think out in this field we're looking at a minimum of 70 bushel beans which would be tremendous especially given the prices now of course anything is possible we could see lower than 70 but i am optimistic that's not going to happen one thing that has my confidence really high is i see next to no foliar diseases or insect feeding on our leaves out here our fungicide and insecticide is definitely doing its job and that's why we spray it every year there is one disease i'm seeing out here which fungicide does not protect against in which you never want to see that fungal pathogen being sudden death syndrome this soil borne pathogen is incredibly hard to predict and also hard to prevent with post applications the intervenal necrosis on this leaf is a pretty good indicator of sudden death syndrome it does share some similarities to brown stem rot the only guaranteed way or at least somewhat guaranteed ways to prevent against this disease are very premium seed treatments olivo being one of them sultro being another we do have a trial on one of our farms where we have some olive oil on half the planter we don't have anything out here some soybean varieties and i have no idea about these 31a95s have a better natural resistance against sun death syndrome this is just one plant here though and all around i don't see that many you hate to lose one to sun death syndrome it's not the end of the world though to look at management of sds in a different lens we're on day 120 give or take of this growing season and this is something that if you want to get rid of it needs to be done on day one so there's nothing we can do at this point in time to come back and alleviate this problem if we see a lot of it in a field we really need to note that down somewhere and say okay two years from now when we rotate back to soybeans after the falling corn crop we probably should consider one of those seed treatments to prevent against sun death syndrome if it spreads into larger portions of the field which isn't really common in this area but it is in northern illinois you can lose a lot of money and i mean a lot of money from sds i spotted some water hemp why'd i walk this way got like six of them that broke through it's really unfortunate when i see waterhemp because i hate it so much that i'm almost morally obligated to walk over here and rip it out and make sure it's dead every female plant you kill though you're saving yourself about 200 000 plus offspring one of the worst parts about waterhemp is that if you throw it on the ground and there's any bit of root touching it will actually re-root within the next week and start growing in so i like to make sure it's really dead for the sake of comparison and to keep things fair we're out in a field of asgrow 38 xf1 extenflex beans i don't have any skin in the game in the corteva versus bear versus all the other seed companies game however these extinflex beans look phenomenal looks can be deceiving but you're going to see these beans i think the potential sky high we'll bend them over and take a look i guess like a soybean doctor look at the pod count on these recall what those three one pioneer beans look like and look at these three eight extinflex beans wow there's so many pods and they aren't planted any thinner than that last field just a tremendous quantity of pods i have two points to make to defend all of our other beans one some varieties of soybeans and maybe these included can be very uh showy they can have a lot of looks to them a lot of prowess but at the end of the day not yield any more like i said you don't want to get your hopes up with soybeans they can really break your heart and secondly this field inherently has a tremendous advantage versus the previous feel for this growing season it has a sandier subsoil it's been extremely wet through july it's hurt a lot of our beans a field like this though thrives when there's a lot of moisture all of these large rainfalls have kept this ground saturated these beans have never hurt for moisture where a lot of seasons they typically do i think that's going to set this field up to be a higher yield environment this year but in most years the previous field we were in you take it any day of the week over this one that's darker ground this is lighter usually drier that holds us moisture better on a very moist growing season like we've had this is the kind of ground you want i guess i should mention the growth stage of these beans pretty much the same as those three ones these are three eight planted the same day on the later side of the group three so they will mature probably a week maybe ten days later than that even though they both went in the ground on the 5th of april that's just the difference between maturity groups if i had half a brain i would have brought some of the pods over to compare from the last field these just aren't quite as filled out some of them are still kind of flat they're pretty much r6 though both fields maybe five weeks left possibly six i'm really excited to harvest these extenflex beans let's just face the music soybean yields are cool and all although they're kind of erratic and hard to predict but at the end of the day if you're in a coffee shop and you're bragging you're talking about corn yields it's all about who has the biggest number the longest year and if you want to have a measuring contest you do that in a corn crop and let's be honest corn is king it was king it always has been king everyone loves to talk and brag about corn 100 bushel beans that's cool 300 bushel corn heck yeah i'd like to take a little step back real quick and maybe make a few comments i've been rather temperamental with my yield predictions all year for both corn and soybeans at one point in time june i was like record deals oh my gosh monster crop then all this rain i was like ah average yield maybe a little bit above average then i was like oh it's actually better than that oh record crop oh back to average maybe below average and i'm kind of somewhere in between average to above average although i haven't walked out here and actually quantified the yields of this corn you can put a number or a much closer estimate on corn production than you can with soybeans there is actually a valid and simple mathematical way to calculate yield potential on corn based on kernels and population now soybeans you can do that too but it's just so much work you have to take a hula hoop out there get like three square feet count off the pods do this that way every pod weigh every seed it's just extremely difficult to do corn is easier we're going to take a look at our corn right here from the outside row there's no denying that our corn looks really good now i'm going to warn you the outside row has no competition this is what i call the instagram row this is where you get your instagram picture or your facebook picture say hey look how good our corn is here watch i'll give you a perfect example of how to stage this this here right here that looks pretty good pop it open a little bit these outside rows are always something else quite the illusion it's all about staging the picture here you pick the most impressive ears you can find maybe rip a couple leaves off make it look even more prominent showcase those and then all you gotta do now is pose oh look at this corn i found in the middle of the field totally not the outside row hashtag god's country 300 bushel corn hashtag better farmer than you hashtag big time operator see that's really all there is to it just find the outside row of corn make yourself look like a tremendous farmer obviously the corn on the outside is going to be better it's not competing against other rows of corn it literally gets twice to three times the sunlight because there's no competition right here if every ear looked like this across the field this would be 300 bushel corn we're talking national corn growers association yield contest winner that's not the case we're going to walk out in the field and get an actual realistic idea of what our corn looks like oh it is so hot outside right now water i haven't even been down the field yet i'm sweating this much just from talking that just shows you how out of shape i am all right let's go it's important to always remember which way north is we've trekked about 150 feet off the end row you usually want to get far away from that to get a more realistic estimate of the yield now the first step to estimating yield is to know your population there are fixed distances to step off depending on your planting population to know how far you get to get the appropriate distance for population in 30 inch rows that number is about 17 and a half foot so it's always good to estimate this i don't have a ruler so take this with a grain of salt and i wear about a size 11 shoe so i would say that 17 steps with my boot directly touching is 17.5 foot i think that's fair 2 3 4 5 16 17 okay and that's right there now the next step is very simple we just count the number of plants in between those two marks to count the plant it has to have a viable ear so that has a viable ear but that plant right there does not have a viable ear so it does not count the population one two three four five twenty nine thirty so there's our mark to get the population for the whole field you multiply it by a thousand so we had 30 plants in that strip that's 30 000 plants per acre really not that great considering our target stand was about 34 500 could just be a bad spot in the field what is usually recommended to be objective is to take a fixed amount of ears or from a very specific spot i like to do three six and ten it keeps you objective one two three pull two three pull two three four pull i'm not even sure if i'm headed the right direction i sure hope so because this is really hot if you don't hear from me again just know i died out in a cornfield it's a good place for me to be no worries we made it before we do the math on this i think that my normal method out here we may have got a little bit lucky some of these didn't have a plant by them so they're going to be a little bit skewed that's just the nature of sampling like that next step is husking them there's no denying that our three years look pretty good we know our plant population now we just have to estimate how many kernels per ear we took three because we want to get a little bit of a sample size to average out with the number of rows of corn is always an even number it always grows in groups of two so let's count right here 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 i think tv time out i'm gonna count this again okay i counted again that one is actually 20 around i really don't think this was a fair one to pull it might skew my numbers a little bit i'll take another sample here in a little bit but we will still go ahead and count this so it's 20 around and then we start a couple down from the top and we count how many are in a row a one two three four five okay we're going to say 40 i can't actually count that high but it looks like 40. so that's a 20 by 40 that's a very massive year you're not normally going to see that out in a field at 30 000 population though it may be possible less population usually results in bigger ears here's our next year it's a little bit smaller 2 4 16 18 around let's say 38 by 18. so another good year two four six sixteen eighteen around and we're gonna do 18 by 38 again on that one we're gonna multiply each one individually add them all up and divide them by three and that makes the average for these three ears 722 we'll round down we use 720. now we multiply that 720 by our population so we had 30 000. so 30 000 right there see 30 000 if you can even see that multiply that by 720 that gets us a really big number 21.6 million the last thing we need to know is a fixed number that is how many kernels per bushel there are a few different schools of thought on what number you should use the conservative value is usually about 90 000. i actually think this year based on the growing season and the fungicide we applied it'll actually be closer to 85 if not 80 000. 90 000 is going to give us a much more conservative response so we're gonna divide that 21.6 million by ninety thousand we're going to hit enter and that is 240 bushel corn right there as i said though got kind of lucky with that draw i'm going to run out to the other side and do it again and hopefully get something a little more realistic oh we're headed north this time into the corn we go so we got 34 there much better stand surely i could have found something better today out of all days to do than do yield estimates in corn it's kind of miserable out here let's chuck them it's very noticeable that the area of the field with the thinner stand the 30 000 plants per acre has bigger ears than the area with 34 000 plants per acre that just shows you the flexibility of the ears and we're going to count these up and see how that yields 14 by 36 14 by 38 and 16 by 35 the average is 532 kernels per year now we multiply that by population which is 34 thousand that's an impressive stand given we shoot for thirty four five eighteen million eighty eight thousand divided by ninety thousand gotta be smarter than the phone that's only two hundred bushel corn so that just goes to show you that this corn right here better population smaller ears did not have as much potential on the north side on the south side where i may have just gotten lucky with my ear pull much better corn 200 bushels versus 240 it's about a 20 increase from this this showcases a very important flaw with yield checking out in your field i picked two random arbitrary spots on different sides of the field i got two numbers 20 off from each other i very easily on that side could have pulled two different ears and gotten 250 bushel corn likewise on the south side i could have pulled a couple different ears and gotten 190 bushel corn it's a very rough number to work off of so don't take these numbers as gospel in regards to the reproductive stage of all this corn i'm assuming it's all the same hybrid i don't know without looking in the records and let's be honest sometimes dad's records aren't the easiest he is the corn planter man a lot of it is r5 which is dent once all of the kernels are dented you are 100 r5 so it's definitely flirting with r5 maybe still r4 which is dough the big differentiating factor between dent and physiological maturity one is the black layer at the bottom of the kernel that indicates that and two the milk layer in here will completely disappear as long as you can still see the milk line in the kernel it's not done growing for as close as we are to the finish line we actually have a lot of crucial things left to do for this corn there's still a lot that can go wrong and a lot that can go right i'm almost certain that this has the wheels turning in a lot of your mind and a lot of questions coming up and i completely understand you're probably thinking well you got 200 to 240 bushel corn what can you complain about that at the end of the day we're in the heart of the most important part of the corn growing process and that is grain fill grain fill is the process of assimilating nutrients and starches into each one of these kernels to add weight to put it simply a kernel that has half weight versus a kernel that's at its full weight potential is worth a lot less that's why this process is so crucial and that's where all of this wet weather and stress really comes into play especially in regards to our nutrients all of this corn we planted the first to second week of april has accumulated about 2300 growing degree units give or take for 110 to 114 day corn that puts it right around r5 beginning of r6 what's crucial about r5 to r6 is over 50 percent of the entire corn nitrogen use goes into place here to fill the grain of course all three of your essential macronutrients nitrogen phosphorus and potassium are incredibly important but let's be honest nitrogen is bar none the most essential for growing a massive corn crop nitrogen is fundamental for the production of proteins within the plant and also to put in the ear without adequate nitrogen it cannot stuff the maximum amount of starch into this year the biggest issue with this is compared to p and k nitrogen is the biggest flight risk corn is a glutton for nitrogen an absolute fiend when it comes time to fill that ear it will do whatever possible to extract as much nitrogen from the ground if it cannot find it there it will literally cannibalize the rest of the plant to put as much into the ear as possible let's be honest everyone at the end of the day the purpose of almost everything alive in mother nature is to reproduce corn is not any different its goal is not to keep the plant alive it will sacrifice itself to produce the most viable offspring that viable offspring obviously helps us financially and feeds the world but when you want to look at it from more of an evolutionary standpoint that's the way it works that makes perfect sense i'm sure that's all fine and good needs to take a little bit of nitrogen well corn uses a little bit more than just a tiny bit of nitrogen most estimates put corns usage at over one pound of nitrogen per bushel per acre in 240 bushel corn crop that is 240 pounds of nitrogen that is a lot we're a few rows into a wetter spot in the corn field and it is chocked full of plant cannibalization all of these lower leaves down here the stalks included are starting to brown out these ears are so hungry for nitrogen that it's willing to jeopardize the entire lower portion of the plant to make that happen you'll often hear this phenomenon described as firing the process of the corn browning from bottom to top as it starts to make use of some of this plant tissue we can see it a lot out here and that is why i'm really concerned about our corn crop our yield count is good right now but there's still a long way to go a good metaphorical comparison for corn plant is a marathon runner now i'm not a marathon runner by any means i'm sure you can tell marathon runners are often very lean there's not a lot of fat on them everything there is designed to reach that finish line kind of like our corn plants here some of you may be able to find flaws in this logic but my understanding is that marathon runners are not equipped with enough natural energy storage to run the entire 26 miles without supplementing nutrients if they don't have carbohydrates or some source of energy store to complete the race they may not have what it takes to finish with a run they may have to walk or they may not finish at all let's say the same is true for our corn plants they've completed 90 percent of the race but what's 90 if you can't finish the last 10 percent it's about the entire thing as they say it's a marathon not a sprint it doesn't matter how good you did in the first 90 if you can't finish the last 10 percent it's not going to matter borrowing any kind of armageddon or extreme weather corn kind of does get a consolation prize we still will have grain at the end of the day however if we want maximum yield potential it needs all of those nutrients to cross the finish line at full speed at record pace and that's the problem we're running into right now and very concerned about is the amount of nitrogen left in the ground but andy you put 120 pounds of actual in with anhydrous 100 plus pounds with 32 percent uan and then soybean credits your dye ammonium phosphate you've probably got 270 pounds of nitrogen out there and i sure do hope and pray that we have a lot of nitrogen left to finish off with our to the metal but that may not be the case we're going to head over to the lab and by the lab i mean the barn and by the barn i mean somewhere a lot cooler than outside because i'm drenched in sweat and i'm going to show you guys exactly what we're running into right now before i dive in and really explain the case of the missing nitrogen i really want to offer a disclaimer that this is a gross oversimplification of what's going on out in our fields soil sciences in the interaction of nutrients within the soil and also within the environment are very complex topics there are people with phds in this discipline so i don't want to throw any disrespect to anyone who's an expert in this field however i do want to present a very simple rudimentary explanation for those who really don't understand what's going on i gave a rather long-winded explanation of the preliminary part of the process i'm about to explain back when we were side dressing our corn if you haven't seen that video i'll link it in here somewhere go back and watch that there's also some sweet drone footage of the side dress bar in the john deere 8400 running you don't want to miss that go back there watch the tractor run watch my explanation this will make a little bit more sense with that added in i am going to rehash a tiny bit of information that way if you didn't see that or you didn't really gather the information correctly you'll have somewhat of an understanding of what's going on most soil particles can be compared to a piece of paper tap all of these particles are jammed together in the soil water has the ability to adhere to it so it can maintain moisture soil particles are also negatively charged so positively charged ions can bind to them let's say this blue dot represents some kind of positively charged ion it is binding into the soil say that this green also represents some other kind of positively charged ion maybe a fertilizer maybe something not beneficial for the soil either way the negatively charged binding sites on the soil attract positively charged ions and they bind together depending on the affinity or the strength of that bond different ions can take precedence over other competing ions either way it is always a positively charged ion that attaches to the negatively charged sites in the soil that is why each different class of soil has a cation exchange capacity essentially this is a rating of how many positively charged ions can attach to that soil a higher cation exchange capacity is usually associated with higher productivity and higher organic matter soils lower cation exchange capacity soils usually have lower productivity and less ability to retain fertilizers and nutrients even some of the most productive soils in the world with the highest cation exchange capacities have a limit to how much they can hold if the soil is too saturated with those nutrients it can still run off as you see this soil particle right there could not hold any more of this nutrient so it dripped off onto the ground this is representative of what's going on in our soil in a very basic sense now let's look at it on a broader scale analyzing the soil particles individually is relatively straightforward when it gets complicated is when we start to look at the soil profile as a whole let's just say that this tube right here represents one acre of soil and its drainage this is the entire soil profile all of its ability to hold nutrients and how it interacts with the environment by the time all of our fertilizer is accounted for we have over 240 pounds of nitrogen in our soil profile it all starts within reach of our corn plants roots for every one leaf stage corn puts on about two and a half to two and three quarters inches of roots the maximum rooting depth of corn is five feet that's pretty tremendous now we come in the fall and put on 120 pounds of anhydrous ammonia let's represent it with this green dye right here the analysis of anhydrous ammonia is 8200 it is entirely nh3 when it hits the soil it interacts with water gains an extra hydrogen becomes positively charged and binds to the soil particles you can see that this green dye is binding with our soil here the soil is moist but not completely saturated there is poor space available meaning that oxygen can get through it we put this in hydrozone in the fall it pretty much all binds with the soil we then make an additional passive nitrogen in late spring or early summer using 32 uan it is a mixture of both ammonium which is nh4 and nitrate which is no3 what's very important to note is that nitrate is negatively charged unlike ammonium it will not bind with the soil profile it will actually stay in solution in the pore space this is a problem because nitrate can be easily leeched my mom bless her soul just let me use all of her food coloring and she doesn't even know it thanks mom okay so a majority of our nitrogen is bound to the soil particles a little bit's in solution what's the big whoop well this is where things start to get a little bit spicy as the temperatures warm up and the growing season progresses there are two microbes within the soils these two microbes convert ammonium the positively charged ion bound to the soil to nitrite which is no2 negative then to nitrate immediately which is no3 with a negative charge as well meaning that as the season goes on our nitrogen is almost guaranteed to be switched to the form which is in soil solution with nothing holding it onto these soil particles now in an average year which i'm going to showcase right now that's not really a big deal as we get rainfall sure the nitrogen is going to work its way down in the soil profile i mean that's just natural the corn roots are going to dig deeper down they're going to scavenge the nutrients out and be able to capture stuff even from the farthest part five foot down is a long way to go when you consider the overall volume of soil it keeps raining but never rains in an excessive amount this is almost the perfect scenario sure we're going to lose a little bit of nitrogen at the end of the day it is impossible to be perfect when you're dealing with mother nature we're going to retain the majority of that for our crop to use we're also not going to suffer the stress from our soil being underwater majority of the time we reach the end of the growing season we've had adequate moisture but not too much the nitrogen that remains that hasn't been utilized by the plant has worked its way down however the plant will be able to accumulate this and use it for its growth assuming that it needs it of the water that made it completely through the soil profile it only has a minimum amount of dye in it this represents leaching leaching is the process of losing nutrients downward through the soil as water permeates it grabs nutrients in solution along with it and heads down with gravity this is our concern this year's leaching now this is a perfect year an average year let's look at something a little bit more moist this middle column is going to represent an above average year of rainfall kind of what i would say we've had this year we continuously had excess rainfalls look at how fastly when you have large volumes of water that nitrogen is capable of permeating through the soil especially in the later months of the summer this is almost free game to go downward those microbes have been very busy during the warm months of june and july converting that ammonium to nitrate next thing you know you get a couple four inch rainfalls in july get a couple weeks the soil stays saturated absorbs a lot of that nitrogen here's another four inch rain two weeks later that's not good here's a three inch rain that's what it's like dealing with mother nature obviously you're going to have the damage of the roots being saturated probably rotting from the lack of oxygen you're also going to be dealing with the amount of nitrogen you lost this right here is a prime example of where we're at this year and how we don't really know where to peg our corn yields we could have enough nitrogen or we could have lost a lot of it if we've lost a lot of the nitrogen that means that we may not have the energy to assimilate all the proteins and carbs into the grain and complete that race at full speed much like a marathon runner running out of energy on the final mile sure you completed 90 of the growing season and reap whatever rewards there are of that however that last 10 can really be the money maker this right here is a very good indicator of all of the nitrogen we've lost into the soil profile that even the corn roots cannot get to not only do they not have the depth to reach it at this point a lot of times when it's this wet the corn roots really struggle to grow or retain that many nutrients in the first place because of all those different problems i mentioned root rot nutrient availability and nutrient loss not only is this a problem for our crops it is also a big problem in terms of the environment nitrogen and other fertilizers that make it through the soil like that can cause big issues wherever they end up large quantities of nitrogen and phosphorus have created a lot of headaches down the gulf of mexico due to all the epoxy they create by creating a ton of algae suffocating the ocean of oxygen and really throwing a ranch into the overall food chain down there so this is where we are this year we're above average in moisture now let's talk about 2019. 2021 has not been a great growing season by any means we've had a lot of rainfall it does not compare though to 2019 for us this was by far one of the wettest years i've ever experienced in my short time here on the farm we didn't get our crop planted until mid may we didn't finish till mid-june we replanted three or four different times we were playing it four times in one field alone it was that wet all season from start to finish we had a really wet april the ground stayed saturated the whole time it kept raining it kept raining it kept raining about the end of april it kept raining are we ever going to get our crop planted oh no market's going up it keeps raining the world's going to go hungry now we're about to plant just kidding more rain we get a little bit of corn planted first week of may it looks pretty good rain it's about three inches second week of may corn still looks fine all the beans i planted died had to replant about half of them okay here we go oh it finally dries up a little bit everything's doing good and then i call this 10 inches in 10 days that's 2019 for you marty's going to be pissed at me and this is what happens when all of your nutrients leach out of the field you got to deal with the environmentalists not that they're wrong but they're still not right to deal with and marty is kind of the environmentalist in this scenario i hope this kind of makes you understand how the excessive rainfalls have really hurt our corn crop or have the potential to rob yield from us now there are things you can do to retain nutrients leave these issues and we do make use of a lot of them i'm not really going to go into big depth in this video because this was kind of a sky-high view of this problem it is so much more complicated than that if you have any questions or comments make sure you drop them down below speaking of excessive rainfall this must be one of those million dollar rains they speak of just spoon feeding our bean crop it's pretty much been a million dollar day for me here on the farm if you round up about 999 thousand dollars come on baby 90 bushel beans give us that sweet bean juice dad's got his truck parked in here out of the storm i better get this cleaned up before it comes back because i may get fired if any of you have any job openings available let me know look at that it's like nothing ever happened the things i will do for you all if you haven't liked the video at this point come on throw a dog a bone for the record this is not water from the rain this is sweat from being outside earlier that is how warm and humid it's been today okay mother nature that's enough looks like we're starting to get some clear skies over there this may have been the perfect million dollar rain survey says four tenths of an inch didn't rain as much as i thought it did looks like the combination of the wind and some heavy rain laid our beans over a little bit it looks like much more of a problem than it actually is if your cornfield looked like that i'd be kind of concerned by midday tomorrow if not by tomorrow morning these things will stood back up and you won't be able to tell at all that they were laid over it does let you get a pretty good view of the pods out here i can definitely see some sporadic sudden death syndrome there's some there there's some there there there so it's kind of hit or miss across the field we really may need to consider adding an sds protection product to our seeds next year we'll cross that bridge when it comes out i think that's more than enough farming for one day if you made it this far in the video i really appreciate you sorry if i utilize a little click plate to get you here sometimes gotta trick people into learning if you don't already have channel notifications turned on make sure you hit that button that way you'll never miss a new video follow us on instagram i'm going to be dropping some merch soon so keep your eyes and ears open for that thank you all for tuning in like the video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and comment down below if you have any questions you know i love to talk about farming have a great day everyone peace you

Channel: aTrippyFarmer

Views: 25,564

Keywords: farming, farm life, farm vlog, farmer, combine, agriculture, corn, tractor, illinois, deere, seed, drones, a trippy farmer, atrippyfarmer, vlog, farming simulator, millenial, farmingvideos, john deere, tractor video, farm, farming videos, tractor stuck, thisll do farm, cole the cornstar, millennial farmer, welker farms, barn, farming videos for kids, heavy equipment, equipment, tractors, gmc, harvest, tillage, farms, how farms work, spring, farming simulator 19, soybean, soybeans, usa farming, fs19

Id: R1V-L8JYjMY

Length: 45min 8sec (2708 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021