Northeast, Nebraska | easymoney - 3/13/2025 20:12
Why would adding a biological or a biostimulant give you a yield response? What are you not doing in your program that a biological would make more bushels
Especially when we are farming dead dirt that is non-functioning in a system that is designed to replace anything biological. We have fungal issues in Corn and beans. Don't look to the soil by another product. We need more yield. Don't look to the soil, buy more fertilizer. Now we have so-called super weeds or noxious weeds. Don't look to the soil. Let's buy another product.
A University studying biologicals is a joke
I started using biologicals about 7 years ago. There are a lot of foo foo juice and fairy dust out there and I have wasted my money on a lot of them. I have found some that are good. The biggest thing about biologicals is you can't just throw it out there and see if you get an increased yield. You have to dive deeper and get into the soil and test it for biology. Test it for disease and test it for pests. The technology is there and it is relatively affordable. I charged my local customers $15 an acre and that includes everything there is a recent price increase. Testing for all of the diseases like white mold, gray leaf spot, tar spot ect... and we tested for pests like nematodes and rootworm eggs. This is a soil DNA analysis of your soil. There are over 10million data points taken per sample and we have seen up to 18,000,000 on some samples. That price is for 20 acre zones on disease and biology and soil nutrient results on a high resolution map with measurements every 1000 square feet. Then we can take your test results and then you can take whatever hybrids of seed you have in your shed and it will tell you which variety will be the best according to the test results. You can make your own fertilizer recs on the program and take them to any fertilizer dealer and have them spread your recs on your field. This program helps break down if you are lacking fungal or bacterial microbes in your soil and what types so you can find a biological of that type and place it where it needs to be. Yes, we have farmed the biology out of the soil and the more we keep using fungicides and harsh chemicals, the worse it is going to get. The reason we are having more trouble killing weeds is we have farmed the mycorrhizal fungi out of our soil. There is no such thing as a fungicide that only kills the bad fungi. Salesmen use that line all of the time because that is what they are trained to tell you. If you look, they will not have that on any labels or websites because it simply just isn't true and possible to do. Google mycorrhizal fungi and read about all of the benefits of them . Pay special attention to their defensive qualities. Weeds are non mycorrhizal so if weeds are growing in your fields, the mycorrhiza cannot help the weeds, only your host plant, aka your crop. When that attaches to your crop, anything that tries to compete with it will get attacked by the fungi, so your roots of your weeds won't be able to compete with the host crop making your weeds weeker and easier to kill. I have increased my mycorrhiza in my fields and by doing that, I don't have a problem killing weeds. Mycorrhiza increase your plants soil penetration strength as well. A normal root can only penetrate soil up to about 300 psi, If you add the mycorrhiza back to it, it can penetrate up to almost 1000psi. That's how you can free up all of that tied up nutrients in your soil and trust me, there is a lot of it out there. over time, as you increase your biology, you will start to see your fertilizer needs lower on your soil tests. I have seen in on my own farms. This is not a 1 year fix, I'm in year 7 and if I hadn't kept doing tillage and gone away from fungicides, I would have been farther ahead faster but residue is still an issue when you are raising 250 to 320 bushel corn. I am noticing though that as I increase my biology, the fast the stalks seem to deteriorate so I am on the right track. Now I'm sure some of you are asking, well how do we treat the diseases if we aren't supposed to use fungicides. Well guys, I work with a very small company and they have developed mix full of defensive fungi and bacteria and we have stopped white mold with it in 4' tall soybeans on 20" rows. My 2 passes of fungicide could not penetrate the canopy and get to the white mold spores. Well our product is systemic so we put a $12 an acre rate on and it worked through the plant and killed it all. We were surprised as we had never used that high of a rate before and faced white mold that bad before either. It was in one of my fields. We used it last year on corn and stopped southern rust. We also had a split field trial where one half was sprayed with our product and the other with fungicide and both were applied by drone. Both products stopped the rust but we had tar spot move in during the second week of september. Late enough to not have a yield hit but I can tell you the fungicide treated half of the field had tarspot on every plant and the biological side had some tar spot, but you had to look a lot harder to find it. There are other good products out there, but you have to test and see what you need first and then look for those products. Our biological product that I sell will not be found in a coop or sold by big ag. It was developed by farmers and we sell it to farmers. It has been around since the 80s, it just never caught on, but now that we are starting to see serious issues caused by our farming practices, we are getting out there and getting people results and helping them build these levels back up. Cover crop no till is a great practice, but it doesn't fit everyone's program or time schedule. No till cover crop will indeed help speed up building the microbes as well. Thanks for reading all of that, God Bless you all |
biostimulants in soybeans
