Panelists give candid takes on agronomy

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Micronutrients, pet peeves, social media and common-sense agronomy were just a few of the topics at the Illinois Soybean Association Field Advisor Forum panel discussion.

Independent crop consultant panelists were Karen Corrigan, of McGillicuddy Corrigan Agronomics in Goodfield in central Illinois; Kelly Robertson, of Precision Crop Services in Benton in southern Illinois; and Kyle Stull, of Stull Agronomy in Waukesha in southeastern Wisconsin. Stephanie Porter, ISA outreach agronomist, served as moderator.

What are you thoughts on foliar feed micronutrients?

Stull: I worked for WinField for three years and we were really, really taught to tissue sample at V4 on corn. The reason we were taught that is that V4 on corn is when boron and zinc are deficient. Winfield sells Max-IN ZMB — zinc, manganese, boron.

You just have to be careful on timing and what products you’re using and look at some of those labels on those micronutrients.

The amount of nutrient that’s in that jug is sometimes next to nothing. There’s 5% chelated manganese products. There’s another product that has 0.3% in it. Look what’s in the jug.

Corrigan: The more things in the jug, the less of each there is, and if that isn’t your yield-limiting factor, what’s in that jug is not going to help you. If that’s not your problem, then the product is not going to do you any good.

Robertson: The biggest issue I have with tissue testing and micronutrients is that there’s no soil sample taken when the tissue samples are taken. What we run into in southern Illinois is probably 40% of the time a tissue test that shows a deficiency and if a soil test is taken at the same time also shows a pH problem you’re not taking up what’s there anyway because it’s not available.

When you’re paying $16 an acres for 0.33 pounds of fertilizer I have a real problem with that, especially when it’s not going to make any difference in yield.

Biologicals is another topic that farmers ask about. What are your thoughts on biologicals?

Robertson: I think there’s a lot of snake oil and foo-foo juice being sold in the name of cutting inputs. Most of the people out there selling this junk don’t have reliable replicated research from sources. What it does, what it doesn’t do, is highly questionable.

My first advice to anybody that calls me is if they can’t tell me what’s in the jug, don’t buy it, and if you do buy some, just buy enough to try it because there’s no research or anything that shows that any of this stuff works.

Stull: I wish those products all worked, but they possibly can’t. There’s no way that statistically every single product they’re trying to sell you will work. It’s just not going to happen.

Corrigan: I would remind you that in a teaspoon of soil there’s over a billion organisms, and if you’re putting the volume equivalent of a Coke can across one acre, how much of an effect are you really going to have. So, I definitely would look for something that’s proven.

Second thing I would do is make sure you don’t kill it before you put it on the field because it’s supposed to be living in the jug and you’re supposed to keep it that way before you apply it.

There’s the buzzword “soil health,” there are cover crops — what are your pet peeves in those realms?

Stull: What’s your definition of soil health? It’s incredibly hard to give any real good opinions on what soil health is because it’s different to every single other person.

It seems like the more we look at some of the cover crop stuff, it just really depends on what region of the country you’re in, what the Haney soil health test says on a specific day you took it because Haney tests can be different from day to day, just like tissue samples can on corn.

What is soil health is so different and it’s so hard to define it so that it can be anything to anybody.

Robertson: The cover crop thing is probably the thing that is my biggest pet peeve in the sense that cover crops are sold as the cure-all. The things that are promised through cover crops are not really real or obtainable and, unfortunately, the programs that are out there to promote cover crops have done farmers a great disservice.

In my county, we’ve got a grant to promote cover crops. So, we’re setting farmers up to fail with cover crops because we’re not doing any training, we’re not doing any realistic expectations and we’re not teaching them how to terminate those cover crops and plant into them.

The benefits of cover crops are real. What we’re doing to promote them is absolutely wrong. Until we get this stuff to where we can apply it over thousands of acres at one time, it’s absolutely useless.

Corrigan: We all have problems with weeds, or should I say our neighbors have problems controlling weeds. I think we need to really look at the fact that we need more non-chemical controls and cover crops can be helpful if you use them correctly.

But in order to do that you have to let them basically be a mulch crop. So, you have to let them get tall enough before crimp them over or kill them in order for them to shade the soil.

That works in years when we have good moisture, not so great if we end up short on moisture. So, there’s a much higher level of management, but as far as helping us with weed control, I think it’s one aspect that we need to look at.

Stull: University of Wisconsin talks about that all the time and it’s more in soybeans than it is in corn just because of that carbon and nitrogen penalty that we’ve got to deal with.

Robertson: I also think on the soil health side of it, we focus on the Haney test and a lot of times the first thing, again, coming from the south and probably a little different perspective than what you guys have north of I-70, but if your pH isn’t right I don’t know why you’re worried about soil health. You’re soil is not healthy to start with. Fix the basics first.

There’s been a phrase bantered about, “the death of the common-sense agronomy.” How did we get here? Can we blame it on social media and what can we do about it?

Corrigan: I think it happened well before social media. If you’re old enough to remember, all the companies had salespeople and they had technical agronomists and at some point that became the same position.

What was expected of them was more of the sales side and not the agronomy side. It was more of pushing sales and have quotas and choosing products and that based on profits for the company and also the shareholders, not so much the farmer.

Stull: Coming down here I was listening to the Hefty brothers and they were talking about spraying insecticide on every single acre. They said it doesn’t kill all the beneficials because they just move into the neighbor’s field, or they’re in the neighbor’s field, and since “that guy didn’t spray, it’s OK to do that.” That’s just terrible.

The integrated pest management is thrown out the window and we start spraying every single acre with insecticide. They even had an episode where they talked about spraying the ditch banks just to try to get rid of all the stuff that goes into the field from the ditches.

Robertson: I look back at my career 30 years ago, even 20 or maybe 10 years ago, most fertilizer dealers, retail locations, companies, basically had the same suite of products.

You had DAP, potash, anhydrous, you had a UAN product, you had the same chemicals. Everything was basically the same.

So, the products that were being sold and the margins in those products was pretty uniform. You selected your retailer based on service and what product they did offer.

Now, I know one salesman in particular that was told that he had to sell $2 million more worth of stuff or he won’t get his trip to the Bahamas.

So, you shouldn’t be grabbing that information and trying it or living by it. Also, who’s sponsoring those people? If they’re constantly railing on about a product, chances are they’re getting sponsored by it. What are they making on the backend of that.

Corrigan: I think it’s really interesting, you see a lot of picture comparisons like early in the season and then come yield time it’s crickets. That in itself should tell you something.

Stull: And then when you see yield results, it’s this half of the field versus this half of the field and that’s the only comparison. Or, I’ve seen comparisons made to adjoining fields not even treated the same or it includes the headlands as the untreated.

Porter: I always feel very strongly about multiyear data, as well.

Corrigan: Anything can be a fluke once. What you need to be profitable is consistency. What can you continuously use that will give you the best return on investment and if you’re curious about products you can definitely look at them, but the universities have weeded out a lot of those. So, if they weeded it out I would probably go look for something else.