Hey guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. We’re out at the Farm Science Review today in London, Ohio. I’ve got Brad Bergerford here with me from Brandt. Brad, thanks for stopping and having a little short interview with us here today. Go ahead and tell us a little bit what you do with Brandt and a little bit of your background.
Yeah, I’m an agronomist with Brandt. I help our territory sales managers. Our manager for Ohio is Ken Friedman. So I do whatever the dealers, whatever the farmers of his need in terms of field research, educational opportunities. I think you guys are going to have some winter meetings. We’re already talking about planning for the winter. So that’s what I do. I try to bring our Brandt product line, whether it’s nutrition, crop protection down to the local level for our farmers can actually see it.
We’re based out of Springfield, Illinois, but farmers will say, “Yeah, but that’s Illinois. Can we have some of this local data?” So I’ll take what we do at our research farm in Springfield and then replicate it here, like on your guys’ farms or your farmers’ farms. And we also have trials at 3 University of Ohio State University, which puts on the Farm Science Review. We have three other branches of the Ohio State University,
the OARDC, that we also do replicated research on. Some of those research trials we’re looking at are, we have a pretty extensive adjuvant line. I’m testing actually 14 of our adjuvants on corn right now and just looking at its efficacy and seeing different timings.
There’s some talk out there that maybe some adjuvants, not necessarily ours, but some adjuvants can cause some damage to crops if applied at certain stages of plant growth.
Knock on Wood, out of two trials this year at two different University locations with those 14 treatments, we haven’t seen no damage. Now next year we’re going to expand that protocol maybe a little earlier at the early vegetative stage.
This was all right in that, you know, VT, early reproductive stage of corn. We may push it back a little bit next year to see if we still get some damage, but knock on wood, everything’s looking good in terms of those adjuvants not having our adjuvants. adjuvants not having any damage issues on corn crops. Another one we’re looking at we have a soybean trial over in Washington courthouse Ohio at the research farm there and it’s this new product we bought this company called Talc USA I think the deal was finalized last year but it really helps farmers that maybe if you can’t put on in furrow or an at planting furrow treatment or at planting treatment with liquid fertilizer with your plant if not everybody set up for that this is an alternative that you can actually add some of the micronutrients some of the different types of seed treatments some some plant growth defense systems to help ward off some of the diseases and insect pressures at those early stages of plant growth we can mix it with talc so
that’s an easy way for growers to adopt some of our technology if they’re not set up with liquid on their plan or they can just put this in with the talc USA products mix it in with the seed because really if you put that product on the seed that’s really where you want that protection anyway it’s when that little seed gets put in the ground it starts to germinate then it can uptake zinc for example if you put some zinc in this talc and it gets that seed coated a little bit of zinc on that seed really helps push it out of the ground and get that plant off to a better start so that’s probably the most exciting thing we have and stay tuned because there’s gonna be a lot of new additions to this talc USA product in the future that’s gonna be very favorable for those farmers that maybe can’t use liquid on their planter but this gives them a great option.
Yeah that’s great we have a lot of farmers that do use our in-furrow program using a lot of brand products and other companies but for those guys that don’t have in-furrow capabilities I think this is gonna give a lot of flexibility and actually ease of use is going to be great because you’re already putting talc on anyways mixing this in the bucket ahead of time and just kind of rolling in and putting that in your planter box makes it super easy to use.
We’re always looking for you know working through dealers like you to put on on farm trials like I said we’re doing some stuff with you but if any farmers want to do some on farm it comes down to doing it on your own farm. You know we can look at the university trials We can look at it in Springfield you guys can look at it But if a grower
wants to look it on their own farm that’s where the true test comes is it going to work on your farm? So we’re open to work with any growers to put some research trials on their farm and See how it works.
Yeah. Yeah, Brandt really makes the rubber hit the road We put these things out on out on different farms and it’s great to see Different soil types different areas, you know, we’re all getting different weather every seems like every season so Guys can really see how different things respond because you know one product might work on your farm But not work on your neighbor just based on practices. So We obviously put out a lot of trials ourselves we work very close with Ken and Brad With the trials that they put in our area, but like Brad said putting a trial on your farm can be super beneficial just Deal with your management practices.
So Brad really appreciate your time today Yeah, thanks a lot for watching guys and we’ll see you next time out in the field.