Videos
Shelling corn After Dark With a John Deere s690
Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag, welcome to a little bit of EZ Custom Ag after dark. Tonight, we’re shelling 639-40 AgriGold, you can notice that the harvest appearance is not quite as nice as what we’ve been in the past few days.
I’ve not had much wind tonight, so dust has pretty much been billowing up in my face most of the afternoon. One thing about it, you hear those beepers going off, that’s my three quarters full. It does not take long to get full in 230 bushel corn.
It’s running about 17 .5 % moisture by average for the field. It’s a 109 day variety hybrid. It has been the number one selling corn in Ohio for AgriGold for the past three years. It’s a good hybrid, we just kind of cheated it on weather this year.
We’re actually on a farm away from home tonight, so we’re putting this corn directly into the bin without drying it, hoping that it’s got a bullseye in bin system that uses just a fan; no heat to dry it. We’re hoping we can knock a point out of it there.
639-40 has been good for us as a shorter season we’re usually 110 to 115 day, but the 109 day gives us a little bit of a shorter season corn to get something drier that we can put directly in the bin which is kind of our plan for this farm that’s just a little bit farther from home.
Those of you that don’t run a combine here’s where all the corn ends up as it’s being shelled. It comes into this grain tank you see, it’s rolling in there. There’s an inspection window behind me, be glad you weren’t riding with me a couple days ago. The inspection window; not the one in the the cab, but the one behind it that goes to the grain tank actually busted and grain started flowing out. It was quite an experience.
For those of you who have never been in a in a combine before just imagine you’re in your car and you hear a shot going off. That’s about what it sounded like. It was pretty scary.
Thank you guys for tuning in tonight. I was just cruising along here and thought it might be kind of cool to get you guys some night pictures or night videos.
Thanks for watching guys and we’ll see you next time out in the field.
How Photosynthesis Works
Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. We wanted to start a little bit of a series on nutrients that plants use. We’re going to talk about how they’re used in the soil and how they’re actually used in the plant because when we get into some of these nutrients, there’s a big difference between mobility and their actual function in the plant versus in the soil with microbiology there.
If you’re a living, breathing human being, this is one of the most important things to you that you use every day and you may not even know it. Because plants use photosynthesis to make their energy, which feed animals, or if you’re a vegetarian, you need photosynthesis more than anybody else.
So, wanted to get into this, whether you’re raising tomatoes, corn, tobacco, cotton, anything all over the world, photosynthesis. Chemistry, but it helps us understand the three main nutrients that are plant beans which is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. So, if we would take six of these and six of these we can make one glucose molecule. When we take six of these up we end up with six carbons just like what we wanted, and 12 oxygens.
Okay, well that gives us plus six oxygens, correct? Then we have six water molecules, gives us 12 hydrogens, which makes us happy, and we already had enough oxygen, so we get another plus six oxygen. That gives us plus 12 oxygen for every glucose molecule, which also turns into two, six, zero, two molecules, which is what we breathe.
When we talk about how planets give us back the oxygen and purify the air, what they’re doing is they’re taking in carbon dioxide, they’re taking in water, and they’re putting back out these O2 molecules, which is what we breathe in to keep us alive. So, photosynthesis is a very complex process that happens in the planet.
I’m not going to go through all of the proteins and enzymes and all the things that are needed that are activated by the sunlight. This is just a very basic understanding of the chemistry side of it that’s actually taking place, and the reaction that’s taking place to give us this glucose molecule.
So, behind all of this, the sunlight is activating photons in the chloroplasts, and that’s what chlorophylls will make sure the plant is green. It’s a whole deep thing that as growers we don’t have to know exactly how it’s working. But, to understand why we need over 90 % of our yield in all crops comes from these three nutrients.
We get all of them for free, unless you’re irrigating, but all of these nutrients are coming to us for free. They’re not the ones you can buy in a jug. You’re not buying a jug of oxygen to put it in almost all your pop -up fertilizer. It just doesn’t work like that.
To understand the other You know 15 essential elements that go into crop production, and not understand the top three. We thought it was very important just to touch on photosynthesis In our plants and give you guys a better understanding of how it works.
Thanks for listening guys and we’ll see you next time in front of the whiteboard.
Nitrogen How it works in the plant and in the soil
Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. Continuing our series on nutrients both in the soil and in the plant, we moved through hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about nitrogen.
So as you can see here, in the plant, it has many different things it can do. If you come into the plant as nitrate, nitrate or ammonium, we’ll get into those here in just a second. But in the plant, it’s part of chlorophyll. It regulates growth and development.
Nitrogen is part of the building block of proteins. So, it’s what I have protein to the grain, depending on what into the spectrum you are, or if you’re a great plant producer that’s going to be fed to cattle, you want to make sure that you’ve got plenty of nitrogen all the way through the year, so that way your grain has a higher protein content.
If you’re a barley grower that is going to put this stuff into beer and you want that. You can have a good, clear product at the end, you’re going to want to pull that nitrogen back so you don’t have such a high protein content and end up with a cloudy beer.
So, knowing what you’re in use with is going to be and how much protein you want in your grain or your end product, nitrogen can play a role in that protein content. Enzymes: nitrogen is used in enzymes for various functions, and also in the plant it is one of the nutrients that is mobile, so it’s able to move to the leaf tips, and up and down to the plant. The soil is also mobile.
We’ll talk a little bit about that when we talk about different forms, but that’s the reason that a lot of guys near salt water areas have issues with algae blooms and things when they’re using nitrogen and then bacteria. So, the nitrogen is able to feed bacteria, and we always talk about carbon and nitrogen ratio when we were talking about bacteria. So, bacteria is one of the smallest things in the soil that’s going to eat all these nutrients up, and it’s just a carbon and nitrogen ratio one -to -one usually.
Bacteria is going to be eaten by fungus. So, fungus has a higher carbon and nitrogen ratio. So, let’s say that they are 5 along. This is kind of like when we did the chemical formula for photosynthesis. That means that a fungi is going to have to eat 5 bacteria to satisfy its carbon need. Well, that ends up giving them 5 nitrogens also. Well, they can’t survive, or sustain that kind of ratio, so they’re going to defecate, for lack of a better term, four of those nitrogens out. That is where we get the nitrogen in our soil.
Our atmosphere is 78 % nitrogen. Why are we putting on all these synthetic nitrogen fertilizer? I mean, we’re guilty of doing it here at home. So, using bacteria that are nitrogen -fixing bacteria, we’re able to bring some of that down out of the atmosphere, depending on what style they are.
Rhizobia bacteria, you know, we see the nodules on the bottom of the soybean plants, and then there’s a ton of other ones, but once they get eaten, by a fungus, that’s when that nitrogen is expelled and released into the soil system for our plants to use. So, keep in mind your carbon and nitrogen ratio as we go on through this.
Zach and I were talking about this before we got on film. Nitrate is what the plant likes to take up. Almonium is the most efficient thing for a plant to take up as far as on the nitrogen spectrum. When you’re dealing with nitrate, that’s more of a growth style of nitrate. When your plant’s, coming out of the ground and you’re trying to get it up to knee high as quick as possible, you put that nitrate on there and it’s really going to encourage growth.
But, there’s a step in here. We’ve got to go from nitrate to nitrite. A good form of nitrogen for the plant, especially in the reproductive stage, because the next form after this is amino acid. That is what the plant is actually trying to get to.
When we’re adding nitrogen to our plants, yes, it has a function in it, but we’re really trying to get to the amino acid and the protein stages, because that’s what the plant is actually creating, using and building inside the plant to get us to the yield that we want.
Like I was saying, this is a more efficient form. I was telling Zach, the nitrate is like eating cookie dough. You know, it’s a lot of fun, it’s great, but the ammonium is like eating a cookie. There’s been energy put into that to convert to this form to make it a more usable form over the cookie dough. You’re closer to the end product than what we’re trying to get to.
I know you’ve heard us talk about BW Fusion’s Amino product. The reason that they have gone to using Amino acids and applying them directly is because they think that they can get a more efficient and effective form of nitrogen on there.
We’re putting a quart of Amino on and gaining 90 pounds of nitrogen. So, it’s a lot less of a volume issue, and the plant is not having to work near as hard to convert nitrate into the amino acids that it needs anyway.
Not only do we have to think about if we’re in the plant or in the soil, what we’re trying to feed, so if we’re trying to feed bacteria, we want to use less hard forms of nitrogen, and then we have to think about solubility. So, nitrate is user -losing. If we’re putting on nitrate form of nitrogen, it can be gone either up or down depending on how it gets treated, if you’re in dry hot weather, or if you’re in wet weather, where that’s going to be sitting under water, and the nitrogen fiber.
Ammonium is a much more stable form of nitrogen. So, it can stay in the soil for long periods of time if the weather conditions are correct. We know a lot of guys out west in Illinois and farther will put their anhydrous on in the fall. They’ve got that heavy black soil. ISECs, they want a whole lot more nitrogen to start with.
But anhydrous is in the ammonium form. So they’re able to hold that nitrogen in the soil easier than if you were putting on a UAN in the fall chances are that’s going to be gone because of the nitrate in that UAN.
When we’re thinking about water quality we want to make sure that we’re trying to use stable forms of nitrogen as much as possible unless that plant is needing it immediately and we’re trying to get that rapid growth like what we’re doing in side dress or at V3.
Not a bad idea to use some nitrate in there to help encourage that rapid growth. We can get a little bit further in the nitrogen here at another time,but I just wanted to give you a basic overview of what forms the plant is using, kind of what it does in the plant, a little bit of what we’re actually doing when we’re applying nitrogen to the soil, and just how it converts in the plant.
Thanks for watching guys and we’ll see you next time back here in front of the white board.
Aug 16 Agrigold innovation days
Hey everybody, Evan with EZ Custom Ag here. I’ve got Brad Wilson, we’re here at Innovation Days in Indianapolis, Indiana for AgriGold.
“Brad, tell us a little bit about your position with AgriGold, and what you do with the company.”
“So, I’m Vice President of Commercials, so basically I run the sales and agronomy for both brands in the U .S. here. I’ve been here about a year and a half now.”
“Awesome. I know you’re looking at a lot of things over the whole country. What are some things that really catch your eye that you’re excited about for 2024?”
“Well, I’ll tell you the thing that I’m most excited about is our genetic pipeline continues to bring a lot of new products, a lot of innovation, and a lot of choice for our customers. You know, the thing that makes AgriLiance and AgriGold different than what a lot of other companies do is that we offer farmers a lot of choice of genetic options that they want to choose from, and trait packages, and the things that we work on every day. We’re unique in the market. We bring some really fun stuff, and we’ve got the power of our parents from both KWS and Lima Grain that bring those unique genetics over here, and then we get a chance to play with them and bring some new products out. So it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re really excited about 2024.”
“Yeah, I know we’ve got a lot of customers that are super excited to get through Harvest here in 2023. Got a lot of potential out there, and we’re all looking forward to 2024. Well, Brad, really appreciate it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, guys, we might not be in the field today, but we’ll see you out in the field next time.
Calculating harvest loss in soybeans
Morning guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. At the home farm today, doing a little bit of checking behind the combine, or I guess explaining to you guys about checking behind the combine. A couple days ago I got out my trusty one foot by one foot square here, and just wanted to get down and kind of show you how we check harvest loss.
I already moved the the residue out of the way here for the most part, but as you can see what we’ve got to do here is count the beans, so I’ve got one here. I saw a half over here, let’s see I think I saw another half somewhere. Oh yeah right there. So, we’re going to call this two beans in this square.
So, for harvest loss when you’re actually running your chopper and spreader, and putting the material over the whole area. Four beans equals one bushel. So, if you’ve got four in here, you’re losing one bushel; if you’re losing eight of them in a square foot then that’s two bushel. So on and so forth. So, I try to keep it under a bushel.
Right here, I’m at about a half a bushel. That’s pretty acceptable, especially as dry as they’ve been, so one thing when you’re running really dry beans, it’s not so much a problem in wet beans, but in dry beans, I like to do this same thing right behind the header. That way you can see if they’re shattering out from the reel, or just the sickle shocking them, or anything like that. You can make some adjustments to your header, such as, how fast you’re running the combine, or how fast you’re running your reel. You can slow those down, or speed those up depending on how your shatter loss is. Then also do it behind the combine to see If you’re running some out the back. You know, out the separator, out the chaffer, or over the grates and you can make adjustments there also.
So, just a quick thing I like to do a couple times a day. Carry my handy square here. Pretty simple tasks that can save you a lot of money. Those bushels add up pretty quick. Just jumping out, walking around the combine, checking your loss to make sure that things are at acceptable levels, and you’re not putting that money on the ground after you’ve spent so much time and effort to get this crop to produce. We don’t want to just blow it right back on the ground. Well, I hope this was helpful and thanks for listening guys. We’ll see you next time out in the field.
Zach spreading cover crop in the Hagie
What’s up guys, Zach from EZ Custom Ag in the field today doing something a little bit different. We’re actually putting on some cover crop with a seeder we’ve had custom made for our sprayer. Let me flip this around for you guys to actually take a look at this thing.
Got the seed tank mounted. In the place of the solution tank and big fan blower that blows through a distributor to get the seed out to the boom there.
This is a pretty interesting concept. It’s a good way for us to get cover crop broadcasted pretty fast, pretty accurately, down a set of scales where it would keep rate very well. With this we’re getting about 40 pounds to the acre on and just really performing.
So it’s kind of the big swap of the year to get the spray tank off of the sprayer and put the cover crop seeder on, but we got it done. Got all these hoses pulled on this thing and actually happy to get her out here and humming today.
It’s a little rough today. This is towards the end of a long week. We started running some beans, and you know it’s fun getting started, but we’re also finding some things wrong and having to fix a few things. We’re just dealing with breakdowns as they come.
All the fun that comes with taking the beans off for us here on our own farm. We’re spreading chicken manure, we’re putting on cover crop, we’re sowing wheat on a few hundred acres this year.
So we’ve got a lot of things going on and a lot of boots on the ground, a lot of wheels turning so naturally things are going to break, but all in all things have been good.
For the lack of rainfall that we’ve had this year things are actually turning out pretty decent. We’re seeing some decent bean yields and really excited to get some of our test strips, and our test plots ran to actually get to share some yield data, and talk about some product performance on some stuff we’ve used this year, and some of our foliar products, starter products, and so on.
So it’s been a fun, interesting, and learning year. We’re excited to get the crop off and do something like this. You know, getting a cover crop on, that’s always a fun thing, and getting to see it come up and green these fields up again.
Just got to keep things growing. That’s the way Mother Nature intended. So, you know, I’m out here in the field, and wanted to give you guys kind of a report and show you what was going on out here at EZ Custom Ag, and that it isn’t just on the road.
We’re in the field, we’re on the farm, we’re putting in the work, we’re putting in the hours and we’re turning the wrenches and moving the machine. So, we really strive to kind of communicate with you guys that it’s farmer to farmer.
We live that every day. So we’ll catch you guys next time in the field, maybe if it rains, we’ll be in the office. So we’ll see you guys next time.
A new solution for your spray adjuvant needs
Hey guys it’s Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. As many of you know, we are in the spraying business, so we thought it was important to tell you about one of our spray adjuvants that we use a lot of.
It is AS-34 +. We use this as a dry AMS replacement at 1 gallon per 100 for most applications. You may have to adjust that some. For most Round Up applications we put on 1 gallon per 100.
It also has drift retardant in it, and a deposition aid. What we like about it is that it’s a lot easier to handle than the 50 lbs bags of dry AMS. It also goes into suspension much easier than dry AMS. Especially if you’re in a position where you don’t have an inductor to give you that swirling motion to help you mix it up.
This is just one of the adjuvants that we wanted to bring to your attention. AS-34+ is a solution for any of your ammonium sulfate needs.
One thing you want to watch out for is that with Liberty you’re still going to have to add some dry AMS with this to get the AMS requirements for Liberty. We still use this as our drift retardant, deposition aid, and it cuts your dry AMS in half.
Just something to keep in mind guys. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you guys next time out in the field.
A new solution in foliar feeding
Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. Beautiful January morning. We finally come into 2024 here, and I wanted to introduce one of the new products we’ll be carrying this year. It’s called Juice from Agra Crop Solutions.
A lot of guys ask us when we get into that early timeframe for corn and soybeans. We’re coming in V3 to V4 on corn with that section, second herbicide pass on beans. We’re coming in with Enlist, Dicamba, one of those to clean up those weeds that are residual that didn’t get in there with the beans or maybe V3 or V4.
Juice offers a pretty good solution to both of those scenarios. It’s a 332 with a whole array of micronutrients as you can see here. It’s got calcium, boron, copper, iron, manganese, and zinc. So it’s got a broad spectrum of micronutrients that it offers.
It also has bio stimulants. When we think of bio stimulants, most of the time we think of PGRs. So, cytokinase, gibralic acid, IDA. That’s the kind of things that we see in Juice. Juice on the biostimulant side, trying to get that plant to branch, trying to get it to grow taller for some instances, and stay short pushing branch in other instances. That’s why we have multiple biostimulants in this product.
We get down to urea phosphate. That is a product that is used as a stress mitigator. When we get into hot, dry periods your plant is producing ethylene gas. We’re using urea phosphate to help mitigate some of that stress and hopefully lower the ethylene gas production.
Juice also has folic acid in there which is mostly just for the uptake of the nutrients here at the top of micro nutrients and the macros. Then sugar acts kind of as like a stimulant. I’ve heard before that giving a pound of sugar to a plant is like giving a piece of candy to a child. It just kind of gets it wound up for a little bit, gets it excited.
When we’re looking at V3 to V5 corn, that’s when it’s determining rows around, so you want that plant to be as happy as it can be trying to determine those rows around. Then, when we’re looking at soybean production, we’re ready to go into the bloom phase. We want to be able to hold as many blooms as possible. We see all these blooms when we’re walking through soybean fields, but what percentage of those are dropped off? Being able to hold blooms, actually get a pod on there, and hopefully catch a rain to hold that pod through the end. That is really our big goal.
Using a product like this that has quite a wide array of components to it, all in one jug, finding one thing we haven’t done in the past as we’ve combined three, four, or five products and built this unit. Now we’re able to offer it in one jug very simple and very cost effective, so we want to introduce that to you guys here at the beginning of 2024 and hopefully you guys are interested and you can see more about it on our website.
Thanks so much for tuning in today guys and we’ll see you next time in front of the whiteboard.