Spring planting season pointers for tillage and planting

Narrator: We are grateful that you are joining us for another episode of the Ag View Pitch, as we know that your time is very valuable. Our team at Ag View Solutions is always here for you for any questions or comments that you may have. Please feel free to reach out to us at cbarron@agviewsolutions.com. And now here is your host, Chris Barron.

Chris

Barron: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ag View Pitch, and we are just about to embark on a conversation around best practices going into the spring planting season. As we record this, we're getting a big snowstorm outside right now, but so it might feel like it's a little ways away. And if you're in a wet spot or in an area where it's a day or two or a week away or whatever, I think this is well worth your listen to kind of just think about some best practice with the planter, with tillage and some of those things. So excited to introduce the panel we have here today. We have Troy Detmeyer, who is an agronomist with Pioneer, and we also have Mike Tierney,, who's with Pioneer and is our area manager, right, Mike?

Mike

Tierney: Account manager/agronomist.

Chris

Barron: Yep, yep. So, and he's, and he's an agronomist too. So we got two agronomists here, and then we also have our equipment expert with us, Brent Judisch, who has been on quite a few times going into either spring season or fall seasons. How's it going, Brent?

Brent

Judisch: It's not going well when it's snowing today.

Chris

Barron: Exactly. And so with that said, Troy, I'm going to start out with you on, on some agronomy questions. Questions here. Um, you know what, I'm just going to start out with this question. What's— what is the, the thing that is most preventable that you guys get called out on after the fact? Okay, you get, you get a call and, and there's an issue. What's the most common thing that is an issue that we as farmers could fix?

Troy

Deutmeyer: Sure, Chris. Probably one of the things that Mike and I have seen be most frequent here over the past couple years would be the sidewall compaction and I should say the, uh, I don't want to phrase that, not getting the seed slot closed properly and getting that uniform seed-to-soil contact that we desire. Especially as we've seen the uptick of high-speed planters, it seems like the amount of air pockets that are at the bottom of the seed trench has increased quite a bit in frequency. And I think it just comes down to, you know, getting out and checking and digging and verifying what you're seeing on the monitor inside that tractor cab is actually, you know, what's occurring back there at the planter.

And I think one of the things that we can do to do a better job of evaluating our seeding depth and how well we're getting that seed to soil contact is rather than just taking your pliers or your seed digger and just digging straight, straight down with the row, is take something almost like a putty knife kind of type thing and go perpendicular press down and then pull back. And what that's going to do is it's going to give you kind of like a forward-facing view of what your seed trench looks like. And because otherwise, if you just dig from top to bottom, you'll end up collapsing a lot of those air pockets and not, and not seeing that. So how you actually dig that seed trench up is a big deal. So instead of just digging straight down like we typically do to check for depth, let's, let's kind of pull that seed furrow back and take a more in-depth look at it.

And then probably the other thing that we've been seeing is, you know, just a lot of sidewalk compaction. Even last year with the dry conditions that we had here along the Highway 20 corridor here in northeast Iowa, we were still seeing a lot of sidewalk compaction. A good way to do that is to actually take a potato fork or a spade and kind of go down at an angle and almost pry that seed furrow up And if that seed furrow crumbles, you're, you know, you're doing a pretty good job. Whereas if that seed furrow also opens up like a book and you, you have one page laying on one side and one on the other, you know that we need to make some adjustments.

Chris

Barron: So that's, uh, that's one thing. Brent, any comments on what he just said on, on some of that stuff with the high-speed planters and any of that?

Brent

Judisch: Well, the new planters have some of your technology. We communicate with the driver, we tell them what would our readings are on the row unit. Every row unit's got a sensor on it, and I think the tendency is if we need 130 pounds, 180 is better. And I think we found the last 2 years especially that that's not necessarily the case. We have better closing systems on the planter, we have the spike wheels now, we have a lot more data we're entering in there. And I think a guy needs to pay attention to that and, uh, and know that you don't need to have over, overweight in the planter. And I always stop with the planter in the field, get out, spin them gauge wheels If you can spin them with a little bit of effort, you're probably pretty close in your down pressure. If you can't spin them, you have way too much down pressure.

And that's where the sidewall compaction we talk about is coming from. And it's getting to be a pretty common thing with new technology. The planters react faster. Hydraulic downforce is great, but it also reacts faster than air does. And I think guys need to remember that, that you just get out. You got to, like Troy said, get out, dig. That's the most important thing. If you don't plant it right, the rest of the year is not going to be very good.

Chris

Barron: Well, with these high-speed planters, Brent, you know, they're labeled you can go 10 miles an hour, right? So why not just go 10 miles an hour and hammer down?

Brent

Judisch: 10 miles an hour in ideal conditions works, I'll admit it. But in general, if you're in especially corn on corn, you have a lot of trash out there, at 6 to 7 miles an hour your ride control is going to start going in the red. And watch the new planters, so there's a feedback on every row unit. It's telling you what your seed meter or what your seed weight's doing. And just follow that. Just because it says 10 mph, you know, today it's snowing outside, does that mean drive the speed limit? Absolutely not.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, right. Mike, any comments on that too? You know, you guys talked about the— in our earlier meeting here today, you guys talked a little bit about the importance of, of that getting that seed depth right, maybe even more so than, you know, that picket fence planting is important But what's maybe even more important than that is that the depth—

Mike

Tierney: well, one of the things that we like to see is that especially in preparation, getting that field cultivator out there and having it be a full 24 hours ahead of the planter to create a homogeneous moisture and temperature, and then you place your seed down at a minimum of 2 inches deep in air on the deeper side so that every seed will imbibe that water equally and you'll get a nice even emergence of all the plants. We find that if we're 2 days behind on emergence, we're losing yield on those plants. And the farther out we get in the difference in emergence, to 5-day difference, we get such a little tiny ear and such a little tiny stalk, it's almost having a weed in the field at the end of the year.

Chris

Barron: So Troy, you had some pictures kind of illustrating the ear size as a direct correlation to that planting depth, and you also talked about, you know, the deeper you go, the more uniform the soil temperature. Talk a little bit about that and the importance of having the right perspective with regard to planting depth.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Sure, Chris. Yeah, you're exactly right. The uniformity of our emergence, like Mike talked about, is going to dictate, you know, whether we end up with 200 bushel corn or possibly 300 bushel corn. And as we go deeper into the soil profile, that moisture and temperature becomes a lot more homogeneous, like Mike said, so it's more uniform. So we can get that plant to plant, you know, coming up within that day or two that we really, really try to target. So, um, you know, just making sure that we could maintain that consistent planting depth is going to then ensure that those plants come up at the same time. And, um, kind of lost where you're—

Chris

Barron: yes, well, as far as just with the plant, with the depth, you know, just with the depth and the consistency, because, you know, you were making a comment that, you know, as you go deeper in the soil, you know, that it is more consistent, the temperature, right?

Troy

Deutmeyer: As we go deeper, the temperature and the moisture are more consistent. So then if we do the job with the planter placing it at that consistent depth and get that consistent seed-to-soil contact, then we will end up having, you know, that uniform emergence that we're really after. And I bring this up, so far we've talked mostly just about corn, but our recent research that I've done as well as the guys over in Southwest Wisconsin have shown that uniforming of emergence in soybeans is just as important as it is in corn. And you know, if we're shooting for 90, 100 bushel soybeans, we absolutely have to have that uniformity of emergence, you know, in the soybeans as well. So making sure that, you know, we do a good job getting it in the ground. And like Mike said, if you're ever in doubt, put her a notch or two deeper.

I've been doing this for 25 years, and we've been out on a lot of calls where guys have planted too shallow, but I think there's only been about 5 times where I've been out where it you know, it's been an issue because it's too deep.

Chris

Barron: One of the comments, I don't remember if it was you, Brent, or Troy, or maybe Mike here, but you know, you guys were talking about the planter's kind of like a boat, right? The faster you go, the more it wants to come out of the water. And kind of the same thing with the planter. Talk a little bit about that down pressure again and what importance of that.

Mike

Tierney: Well, it seems like if we, we create too much down pressure, uh, like Chris says, with a boat, when you're taking off, you get a kind of plane it off. And, and if, if we're doing that with the planter, it seems like we want to push harder and harder and harder, and all we're doing is creating a, a sidewall compaction situation. And even last year when it was kind of dry out, uh, we went to fields after the fact and the farmer said it was dry when I planted, and, and after it rained a little bit and the seed furrow came back open, and we could see right where that planter had been pressing too hard. Brent's shaking his head. You got something to add there, Brent?

Brent

Judisch: Well, yeah, if you don't— you can put the press wheel or the closing wheels and all the pressure you want, but if you don't have a nice ribbon of soft soil over top of that V-trench, it's gonna open right back up. You get a one Sunday or sunny windy day and if that trench is gonna open right up and then your seed's not gonna grow because it's just gonna dry right down to that seed. So you gotta, you gotta have them gauge wheels. They have to be able to spin by hand when you're planting. There can't be too much pressure on them because that weight, you know, you're only planting 2 inches deep and that soil's loose down to about 3 inches if you do tillage. So you've got a nice fresh batch of dirt there to work with and you're going to compress it down and it's going to be a, it's just going to be a problem the rest of the year if you don't do it right the first time.

Chris

Barron: I don't, I don't want to back up here, but I sort of do for a minute. You know, we're talking about the planting, but you know, that planter preparation with that tillage pass. One of the things you— I heard you— overheard you guys talking about, Brent. I think the three of you were talking about the importance of getting that field cultivator leveled and how probably a lot of us maybe don't do the best job on that. Talk a little bit about that and kind of what things we need to stay focused on with getting that, that tillage tool in the right condition and calibrated right.

Brent

Judisch: Well, soil prep is very important in planting, whether you're strip till or you're a conventional fill cultivator, a vertical till, and take that machine, get it on cement and get it level side to side, get it level front to back. It's easy if you've replaced a couple tires on the mainframe or the wing and they aren't the same brand as what was on there, you can easily be off an inch or two. Well, if we're gonna fill cultivate 3 inches deep but I got part of my machine's 4 inches deep, it's gonna slab and I'm gonna have chunky conditions coming out of them areas. So we think fill cultivators, ah, just go out there and go like heck and get, you know, do the job, but if you don't do it right before the planter gets there, it's going to be hard for the planter to overcome some of them tillage mistakes.

Chris

Barron: Good, good comments. Any other comments on the—

Mike

Tierney: well, we didn't talk about row cleaners at all.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, so good call.

Mike

Tierney: Okay, well, uh, it's so important to have those row cleaners cleaning out an area for the seed to go into. If, if you've got a piece of residue laying across for it when the opener comes through,. It's either going to cut it or it's going to pin it down. And when you get a seed pinned down against residue, you're not going to get uniform moisture and you're going to have uneven emergence. And once again, you're going to have small ears on those plants and spindly stalks, kind of like a weed-like situation out in the field.

Chris

Barron: You guys talked a lot about— or I think, Troy, I think that was you talking about those air pockets on the high-speed planters. Was that a speed thing? More so like they were going faster, needed to slow down. I think we might talk about that in the beginning here, but just to touch on that again.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yeah, a lot of the ones that Mike and I saw last year were just the fact that guys were going, uh, probably faster than what the conditions, you know, allowed them or what they should have been traveling at. And therefore it kind of goes back to that boat coming out of the water and the, the automatic down pressure system said, I'm not running enough ground contact, so it pushed harder to try to maintain the ground contact. And that can be really deceiving because if you don't do a good job of digging from the, from the surface, it looks like you have the seed slot closed and you dig down and there are pockets there. So in a lot of those cases, if they would have slowed down, that would have reduced the amount of down pressure that it would have taken to maintain their ride quality and, you know, would have impacted that.

The other thing that we found over the past few years is you know, a lot of these different spike-type closing wheels can really, really help that out. And I see a lot of these newer planters, especially the Deere's that are really popular in our area, are coming out with some of those spiked-type closing wheels, and that seems to be improving things a lot.

Chris

Barron: Okay, awesome.

Brent

Judisch: And there's a new option now for the air downforce on the closing wheels. So not only do we have air downforce on our our machine, we have on our row cleaners, we have air for down pressure or up pressure. And now we have closing wheel up, down pressure, air pressure. And so it's really easy to get everything set right, but we have to start with a baseline. You know, if 30 pounds is right, maybe in bean stubble, 30 pounds is right on the closing wheels, but maybe in a corn on corn field, maybe 50 pounds is right. So I just can't, just can't, um, really make them think about how important it is to get out there and dig every field. Because what worked in the first field of the day, it may not be the same in the next field today.

So make sure we're adjusting the planter to the conditions we're having, not just set it for the morning and we're gonna go plant 12 hours and do the same thing all day long.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, we talked about the seed tender operator being trained on how to, um, you know, how to dig. That's one of the things, you know, Mike, you brought up, you know, maybe we bring the, the seed rep in or somebody just to help us with a, you know, 10-15 minutes of training on how do you dig behind the planter, what do you look for, what are the key things you're looking for— those air pockets, the hair pinning, the, the depth, which is, Troy, you said the most important thing. Those kind of things, just making sure that we're cross-training the planter operator to cross-train the person bringing the seed. Because the planter takes off going across the field, that person doesn't have to leave probably instantaneously. They could stay there and do some digging. That digging could pay pretty big dividends, couldn't it?

Mike

Tierney: Yeah, we want to keep that guy in the planter running, and the guy tending the seed, uh, you know, with a little bit of training, uh, can check each row, right? Sure, we've got the right depth and that we're not running too fast and get an air pocket in the bottom, or, or that the down pressure is set correctly, right?

Chris

Barron: Another thing I heard you guys talking about offline today too was a little bit about Okay, you know, you get— you calibrate everything at 5 miles an hour, whether it's speed, depth, all of the settings, and then you take off out in the field and you run 7 to 10. That's a lot different, right? So who wants to take that one and talk a little about that?

Brent

Judisch: Well, that's back to the boat in the water thing. You should always go out when you're setting your planter and you got a pretty good idea if I'm going to run 6 or 7 or 8 miles an hour. And when you're out there doing your testing, run that speed. Not only is the ground contact and the depth gonna be more important, but your seed meters— I don't care what brand of planter you have, the seed meter is going to be the most consistent. If I set my vacuum at 16 pounds of pressure and I'm running 7 mph, it's going to be the most consistent at that speed. If my speed's changing, it's trying to catch up or overpopulate or underpopulate. Um, so when you go out in the field before spring, I recommend get that planter out in the field, don't put seed in it, go out there and make a couple passes, you know, a week before you plant.

Chris

Barron: Get everybody excited, get your—

Brent

Judisch: but get your—

Troy

Deutmeyer: the neighbor nervous.

Brent

Judisch: Yeah, get your GPS set, get your hitch set. A lot of guys don't pay— the hitch is very important on a two-point planter. You want to carry your hitch just a little bit above center, get that set. Um, go out, make a couple passes and make, you know, and test everything about. But do it at the speed you're probably going to plant at, because a 5-mile-an-hour is a whole lot different than a 7 mph when it comes to down pressure and spacing and all that.

Chris

Barron: And your GPS calibration too, if it's going to plant, if it's going to drive straight too, right? Especially if you're on strip till or something.

Mike

Tierney: You're gonna—

Brent

Judisch: if you're gonna drive 8 mph, you're gonna have to have a higher, a higher AutoTrac setting than if you're driving 5 mph because you're gonna want your tractor to react faster to it. So, right, yeah, just get the speed set and try and stick to as much as you can.

Chris

Barron: So another thing I want to hit on, Troy, and I'm picking on you a lot here, and Mike, I guess too, but is, you know, you commented on the temperature, and this is something that I hadn't thought about, and I think a lot of people don't. But, you know, you got your seed in your shed, and the shed's 42 degrees, and all of a sudden you get that 80-degree day. Talk a little bit about some things that people need to pay attention to with that temperature change there.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Sure, Chris. You know, as the planters have gotten larger, You know, sometimes we run into situations where it's hard to get that seed blown from the bulk tank out to those outer rows. In the situation that you just described is, you know, probably what we're setting up for this year. You know, we're 10 days, 2 weeks out from planting and it's snowing right now. So we're gonna be bringing cold seed out of the shed and it's, you know, the example I gave today was, you know, if you were outside today and walked into a building and you were wearing glasses, those glasses would fog up and have a bunch of moisture condensing on them. And that's essentially what the challenge can be, getting that seed blown out to those outside rows. So putting the proper amount of talc-graphite mix in there can be really important.

We really encourage guys to, you know, get some of that stuff sprinkled throughout the tank before you even fill it. And especially the talc is the drying agent out of that mixture. And the more moisture that we have, you know, in the air or those condensation situations is where you might have to play with that talc combination just a little bit. And the other thing that I'm sure Brent can vouch or that he sees as well as we do is when it is not blowing out to those outside rows, the thought process is, well, it's not blowing out there, so let's go ahead and crank that blower pressure up. And that's actually, actually you need to bring it down and I'll let the equipment guy talk about it.

Brent

Judisch: Yeah, start off here, a vacuum or a CCS planter, 16 PSI is about where you wanna start. But like Troy says, if it's not blowing to the outside, well, I'm going to go to 20. Well, that's actually worse. Sometimes backing it off down to 13 or 14, um, because, uh, you know, the seed's only going to go out to the out units when there's air going out the end of the tubes. And increasing the pressure in them tubes does not necessarily increase the amount of air going through them. And so, but it's usually not an air issue. It's like Troy says, it's a talc issue or it's a moisture issue. It's not normally the planter's fault. It's usually something's going on that the seed's actually caking up or bridging up over top of the outlet tube. And if air can't get out of that tube, nor can seed.

Chris

Barron: I'm just guilty of going back there and banging on the bottom of the thing and hitting the hoses and like, why are these things not feeding through here, you know, and just be frustrated. But that's— those are all really good.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yeah, one of the things that guys can do if, you know, if they have their planter maintenance and everything ready to go, and they do have a heated shop, is I would encourage guys to actually start bringing that seed into the shop and letting it warm up here over the next, you know, 10 days to 2 weeks. We can avoid probably 95% of those situations, you know, if you have that luxury of having room in your heated shop to get that seed in there and get it start warming up.

Chris

Barron: Yep, that's good, good call. So I want to wrap up with a couple of final questions here, and, and it's really around the idea of population. And the first thing Troy and I keep picking on you here, but you know, that you talked about that I thought was really important is knowing your hybrids and understanding the importance of population to a specific hybrid and how that correlates to yield. And if you want to start on that, Mike, if you have some additional comments, I'd like to hear what you guys have to say on the population piece.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yeah, we've been running population trials now for probably close to a decade out in customers' fields rather than just on research farms, and You know, every hybrid has a sweet spot and, you know, we've got some where $34,000 is what we need to optimize economic yield. And we have some that, to be honest with you, we're telling guys to drop them at $30,000, $31,000. And if you push those too far, we actually go backwards in yield. So you've lost revenue and you've also added to your input cost as well. And, you know, I can let Mike talk about what we've seen from standability standpoint.

Mike

Tierney: Our comments are for Northeast Iowa, and certainly at those populations, we want you to be checking with your local sales representative, right, and get a recommendation from them, because what fits here in Northeast Iowa may not be what works well in Illinois or Indiana, wherever this podcast is going out to. But we here in Northeast Iowa, we sure do see that You know, we're not recommending anything over 34,000, and like Troy said, sometimes 32, 31 is just fine. And if we have more than that, we lose yield. And then the other thing we see is sometimes we get into some situations where some people put that population up to 38,000 and we get too doggone many plants out there. And then when the wind blows through in our area, it seems like it blows every year along Highway 20, those fields that have those extra plants tend to get knocked around a lot more.

In our population trials, we can take a drone shot above and pick out those plots that have 38,000, and you compare those to the standability of something that has a 30,000 plant population, it's just night and day how much better they stand. And, you know, when we knock corn down like that, we lose yield. We lose a lot of yield. So We just, you know, we're going to get top-end yield. We say, you know, you can probably get out of a 30,000 stand, you got a potential for 300 bushel per acre here in northeast Iowa. And so, you know, 31, 32, 34 on some hybrids that we're recommending here.

Chris

Barron: We use granular, you know, the prescription, and get— use that to get things set up. Any comments from you guys, and you as well, Brent, just on making sure that that prescription is, is thought through and any, any recommendations there on prescriptions.

Mike

Tierney: We really don't need a great deal of range on that, you know, on corn, on your best yielding ground for some of the hybrids, you're going to be up there at 34,000, and then at the lower yielding potential, you're going to be maybe 26 or 28 in some situations if you get on some sand. One thing I would like to comment on is that we see a lot of advantage to variable rates of soybeans too. And it's just the opposite, is where you've got your best yielding soybeans. What we run into in Northeast Iowa, high fertility, maybe long-term corn on corn, and we put some soybeans out there. And if we're planting kind of the typical 140,000 per acre, we can knock beans down. And we, you know, when we knock those beans over, we lose 5 to 8 bushels off of them. And what we found is if we drop in 110,000 or 120,000, we can keep the beans standing better.

And then when you go to your, your lighter ground or where it's not such a high yield potential, you can plant some extra seeds there, maybe go up to 150,000, 160,000, and you'll make your lighter ground yield better. So we recommend, take a— if you haven't tried it, try variable rate soybeans this year. And once again, if you can talk to your Pioneer sales rep, they should be able to help you get set up with a variable rate prescription.

Chris

Barron: I'm always guilty of this. Every podcast I do, I'm always like, that was my last question. Oh wait, no, it's not. I got one more. I came up with another one here. You were talking about soybeans, and, and two, two, two-part question. The first part is, is I think we're all as farmers guilty of thinking of the, um, the soybean is that, you know, I don't know what the I don't want to say it wrong, I guess, but you know, it's the stepchild or whatever. It's not the first one there that, you know, we're going to be— we're concerned about the corn and the beans. Let's just throw them in the ground. That's one. The other thing though that I really want you to touch on is seed treatment, because, you know, there's some really key things that I think Pioneer's doing with seed treatment that I think is worthy of mentioning here.

If you guys want to hit on that real quick, because I think it's a really key thing that a lot of times people don't think about on the soybeans and the importance of that.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yeah, there's been a lot of improvements here over the past 5 to 7 years. Uh, Pioneer now kind of has our umbrella as Lumigen seed treatments, and it seems like every year they're kind of tweaking that concoction, if you will, to, to try to optimize things. And, um, you know, we went to Ethyboxum here on the corn a couple years ago, and that's really strong on Pythium. And, and since then we've had just really good stands. Guys were planting and super cold conditions that actually made us a little bit nervous, to be quite honest with you.

Chris

Barron: And it's— that wouldn't be any— anybody like us, we don't— we wouldn't do that.

Troy

Deutmeyer: When you guys, you guys are Snapchatting us, uh, your soil temp's 38 degrees and you're out there planting corn, it makes, makes your agronomist a little bit nervous. But, you know, things have pulled through. And, you know, the vigor of the hybrid has helped, and the technology that's in the planters has helped as well, getting us established. But yeah, on the soybeans too, you know, there's been some new fungicides and insecticides that we've added as well to help give us, you know, better SDS protection, soybean cyst nematode management, you know. And, um, you know, any other ones that I'm forgetting?

Mike

Tierney: Just the fungicide that we put on them, uh, allows us to plant soybeans earlier. You think back 25 years ago, and if we would have planted soybeans on April 15th, which I was talking to a grower yesterday and he's hoping to get planting soybeans on April 15th before he plants his corn, we would have known for sure that by May 1st those soybeans would be mush and it'd be a replant. Well, these seed treatments now allow us to plant our soybeans earlier, uh, the fungicide portion of the seed treatment.

And by planting earlier, that's one of the things that we think has really helped increase our— well, the research indicates it The earlier you plant your soybeans, outside of the fact that you might get a frost or hailstorm take them off on Mother's Day, the earlier you plant your soybeans, up until the insurance date, I suppose I better say, the higher your yield's going to be on soybeans. And, you know, you think back years ago, Brent, and we used to get done planting our corn on May 1st, and we'd take a week off and wait till—

Chris

Barron: or two—

Mike

Tierney: wait till after Mother's Day. And then go plant soybeans. And now it's— the planters are rolling with soybeans either ahead of the corn, or a lot of operations that we work with have two planters, one for corn and one for soybeans.

Brent

Judisch: Yeah, Grandpa said he couldn't plant beans till May 10th.

Chris

Barron: We want to be done way before May 10th, you know, at least on my—

Troy

Deutmeyer: our operation.

Brent

Judisch: Absolutely.

Mike

Tierney: Well, we're— that's going to happen this year.

Brent

Judisch: But we were talking earlier, you know, Troy made the comment, you know, You know, you can get 60-bushel beans by doing some things, but if you want to get 80-bushel beans, you've got to do two things: plant them early and plant them right.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, and that's a good, good point. I mean, you made that point, Troy, just on, on plant, plant your soybeans like it's corn and you'll, you'll be rewarded for, for treating it that way.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Absolutely. Yeah, we, we've seen that, you know, taking that care You know, if we put as much management into our soybeans as we do our corn, and as much TLC that we put into our corn, if we gave that to the soybeans, you know, those are the guys that are constantly ripping off the 80, 90, touching the 100-bushel range, right? Soybeans love management just like corn does.

Chris

Barron: Yeah. So any, any final thoughts from anybody here? Uh, anything I didn't hit on that I should have?

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yeah, I just got one thing. I oftentimes get calls from growers driving in the tractor when they're planting and, you know, they're disappointed because they only have 99.5% singulation. And I asked them, well, how are the planting conditions and are you maintaining your seed depth? And I guess the sexy part right now for the talk and people Snapchatting pictures is when they're planting and they're getting 100% singulation. And I guess that's great, But let's just make sure that, you know, we're doing all the other things right that maybe the screen in the cab isn't showing us. And I'll take 95% singulation over having sidewall compaction any day. So just be sure to get out there and check and don't pat yourself on the back too quickly just because the monitor says you're getting 99+ singulation. And there's a lot of other things going on that we need to pay attention to.

Chris

Barron: Maybe some pictures of the corn in a, in, the seed with really perfect seed-to-soil contact at exactly 2.3 inches deep, right?

Troy

Deutmeyer: Send those to your agronomist rather than the screen showing 100% singulation at 10 miles an hour. Exactly.

Mike

Tierney: We've never seen any of those yet, right?

Troy

Deutmeyer: Maybe we should get— have a prize out there this year for those that snap us or text us a picture of that perfect seed furrow.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, yeah. Well, Well, I do want to put a plug in for Pioneer too, because, you know, you guys, you know, have a phenomenal agronomy background and you guys support us. You support our families, Pioneer agency and a lot of other agencies. And you guys do a great job of being there for us and giving us the service that we need and the information that we need most importantly, and that backing. So thanks a lot. Any comments, Brent, from you on the equipment side and we'll wrap it up.

Brent

Judisch: Oh, I just, I just laugh. And we talked earlier, there's never enough time to plant right. There's always enough time to plant twice. Yeah, I remember that.

Chris

Barron: Yeah, that's true.

Brent

Judisch: Troy said get out, dig, have somebody else dig while you're planting. Um, if you don't plant it right, you can forget spraying, you can forget side dressing, you can forget combining. If you don't plant it right, the rest of the year is not going to be a profit, right?

Chris

Barron: All right, well, Brent Judas, Mike Tierney, Troy Detmeyer, thank you guys very much. This was a great conversation and really appreciate it.

Troy

Deutmeyer: Yep, just want to wish all the growers out there safe planting season and successful 2022.

Chris

Barron: That's awesome. Thanks, guys. We'll appreciate everybody listening, and we will catch you again next time on the Ag View Pitch.