Morning guys, Evan here with EZ custom Ag. If you watched our last video you saw that we were Running some beans actually out in the field on our home farm, but today we’re back in the office. We’ve got a little bit of rain this morning, so we’re not going to be able to be in the field until at least after lunch.
So, we kind of wanted to talk about the big elephant in the room. If you’ve been on social media of any sort, or even on Google, Yahoo, or the news anywhere you’ve heard about the 200 bushel soybeans that broke the world record here a few weeks ago. Alex Harrell in Georgia pulled that off, and he gave a lot of credit to the Brandt program that he was using for foliar feed on his beans. A lot of guys have been asking, “Well if he’s using Brandt then I should be too.” I was given his mix that he used on his foliar feeds the other day, and I wanted to explain a little bit of it to you here today.
He used seed zone zinc as a seed treatment on his soybeans to start with. They were Asgrow Extend flex beans. I’m not sure what maturity range he’s growing down in Georgia, but I do know that they were Extend flex. He’s using seven passes of foliar, which is completely unheard of up here, but for 200 bushel soybeans it definitely might be something to try. In the Brandt lineup, he’s using Smart Trio, Smart Quatro BMO, and KB. These are all products we’re very familiar with here at home. He’s using them in different ratios. You know sometimes he’ll run a quart of Trio, a quart of Quatro, he’ll run a quart of each one of them at some point, whereas, we’ll go down to 24 ounces on some of them all the way down to eight ounces on BMO. We’ll actually post the list of his foliar feeds and what order he did them, what timing he did them, and everything under this video in the description, so be sure to click on that so you can see what he was actually doing.
The wild card for me when I got his list was the southeast crop mix in Trio and Quatro I’ll explain a little bit here. I want to make sure I get the numbers right, so in Quatro we have five percent nitrogen, two percent sulfur, a half a percent boron, two percent manganese, .005% of a percent of molybdenum, and 2 % zinc. In Quatro, we have molybdenum where in Trio we do not. That is the main difference between Quatro and Trio. When we look at the southeast crop mix, it’s more of a Trio style product with the addition of magnesium. In Ohio, we have a lot of high mag soils of sticky soils that like to crust on us. So, magnesium is basically a bad word. We’re always using high cal lime. We stay away from the Dolomitic, so using Magnesium seems really counterintuitive, but if we look at soil chemistry magnesium can tie up magnesium. Which is really strange, but that’s how the soil chemistry works.
When we look at our crop production systems there are times that our plants are actually low in magnesium, the actual plant tissue not our soil test, but our plant tissue is low in magnesium. Magnesium is the building block of chlorophyll. It’s one of the main things needed for photosynthesis to happen. Get those sugars cranking in that plant, and we know that we need our soybean to be a sugar factory in solar. Basically, a giant solar panel, so what he’s doing with that southeast crop mix is he’s trying to boost up those magnesium levels in the plants, get more photosynthesis, pack more sugar into those seeds, and hold more pods. Which, is our whole name of the game is to hold more pods. I’m still going to need to do some trials on foliar magnesium to see if that can actually help us here, but he’s using the southeast crop mix in every pass where these were mixed around in different ratios this went in every pass. So, obviously he’s seeing some really great benefit from that magnesium. I think that’s something that maybe we need to turn our focus on.
Okay, we’re high in the soil but if our tissue tests are lacking it, maybe we do need to give it a little shot in the arm, and try to get a little bit extra into the plant, and make photosynthesis run a little bit harder.
Pricing will be released next week on all these products for the early order program for Brandt. So be sure to contact us. We can get you pricing on what this program would cost. We can piece it out if you want to try just parts of it. You know, not everybody’s able to make seven passes through their field to try to do a trial on soybeans. Maybe, we cut that back to three, four, whatever you’re comfortable with. But, I think for what it’s going to cost, if that moved him up to 200 bushel soybeans or at least was a piece of moving him up to 200 bushel soybeans, it’s definitely worth a try in your field.
So, we’ll hopefully see you next time out in the field guys. Get through this rain and get out there, run some more beans, and give you guys some live footage of what our hybrids are doing. So, thanks a lot, guys.