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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, first-generation strip-tiller Eric Reed shares his formula for high yields with a limited budget in poor soils.

Eric Reed had to figure it out on his own when he started strip-tilling corn on the Tennessee/Alabama border. His first yield was 170 bushels per acre in 2015. Four years later, he was up to 260 bushels per acre. And shortly after that, he broke the Alabama dryland record with 316 bushels per acre. 

The Elora, Tenn., native shares the keys to his success and lessons learned along the way, including insights on equipment, compaction, hybrid selection, plant populations, fertility, planter prep and more. 

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today’s production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement, and products that meet harvest-time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at yetterco.com.

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Full Transcript

Hey, thanks for tuning into another edition of the Strip Till Farmer podcast. I'm your host technology editor, Noah Newman. Big thanks to our sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment as always for making this series possible. Today we're going to hear from Eric Reed, first generation strip tiller from Elora, Tennessee. He had to really figure it out on his own when he started strip tilling corn on the Tennessee Alabama border. His first yield was 170 bushels per acre in 2015, but he didn't give up. Four years after that, he was up to 260 bushels per acre, and then shortly after that he broke the Alabama dry land record with 316 bushels per acre. He shared the keys to his success during the 2023 National Strip Tillage Conference. Let's listen in to part of his presentation.

My name's Eric Reed, also known as the Crop Critic on YouTube. I was featured on season four Corn Warriors. I focus mainly on high yield, high management, low budget. Yes, I can do this program. Just because you don't have the financials and stuff like that doesn't mean that you can't grow high yield and crops. Okay? If you want to know where I'm located, has anybody ever heard Jack Daniel's Whiskey? Okay. I live 15 minutes from Jack Daniel's Whiskey and that's in Lynchburg, Tennessee, but I live exactly on the state line. Lynchburg is just a little bit north of me, about 15 minutes, but live on the state line. I farm both states. I farm Tennessee and Alabama, both. 2015 was my first corn crop, 170 bushels. That's all I could get. 2019, 260 bushels. There was no playbook for what I was doing. I'm a cotton farmer.

Me and my wife own a cotton gin. Grain is foreign to us, but I started growing grain due to rotation purposes. Then in our air, there's not a big raw lay of land, so we're all in competition, us farmers against each other, so I have to stay in competition with them. They were given the old, "Cottons hurting the ground. We're going to take your land." So I started rotating and I started rotating for the wrong reasons. I started rotating just to save my ground and not growing yields. That was the wrong mentality to have. It starts with soil sampling. We pull our own soil samples. That's a picture of my soil sampling rig right there on my gator. I know all these co-ops do soil sampling and I'm not talking co-ops, I'm just telling you my experiences with them. All these co-ops, they put an $8 an hour guy that's probably an intern on a soil sampler with an iPad and turns him loose.

Now, who knows your farm? You do. Do you think that $8 an hour guy gives a rat's rear end about your farm? No. He's worried about your fertility program and the co-op's worried about your dime. I would advise you to pull your own samples. You know the hot spots in your field, you know the weak spots. That guy don't, and after I started pulling my own soil samples, I realized how easy it was. If that guy was a lazy bum, he could sit right over there in that corner right there on the iPad and click 25 locations on that map and get a shovel full of dirt out of that corner over there and bust it up into 25 bags and call her good. You need to pull your own samples, guys. I'm telling you, it all starts here. Pull your own samples, draw you a baseline for your fertility right here.

Compaction, this is a big, big no-no right here in my world. We fight it all year long. I said it in a little group meeting here just a few minutes ago, our dirt is as red as this carpet and I'm not exaggerating it. When NASCAR builds a racetrack, guess where they get the dirt? I'm not laughing. They built five schools in our county. We sold them the dirt to build the schools on top of. Low CECs, less than 1% organic matter and we're growing 300, 350 bush of corn consistently with no irrigation. I know I drove eight and a half hours to get up here and of course the guy that works for me, he's driving. I'm looking out the window like a little kid just drooling at the dirt you guys have up here. If I can go 350 bush of corn on red dirt like that right there with no water, that dries out in two days, there's no telling what I could do with y'all's, but I wouldn't know how to act and y'all wouldn't know how I act in my dirt.

This is the ways we find compaction right here. We have tracks on our planter. We all know how these 24 row planters, how they sink in the center. I have two seed tanks that are full of seed. I have a 600 gallon tank on the tongue of it that's full of in-furrow. This is my planter tractor. There's 700 gallons hung on the nose of that tractor and it is on tracks. Tracks. This is how we fight it when we're planting. This is how we alleviate it in the field. This is also my form of strip till. I can't afford a strip till guy. I farm 1500 acres by myself, but you put me and my wife and my brother-in together, we form about 4,000, but this is how I fight my compaction.

This is how, see how I'm fracturing? You see that raised hump right there. Now I also have some egg beaters that I put on the back of this to finish up with in the spring and create a little strip. That's what we're all here for is strip till. You notice I'm not putting any fertility down. Okay, we'll get to that in just a minute, but we put all of our fertility down. Sometimes we run this in the fall depending on how much time we have. Of course when I get out of grain harvest, I jump right out of grain harvest into cotton harvest. Sometimes we'll be plumb into December and January picking cotton depending on the weather, how it pans out. Most of the time when we're done ginning in January, so when Eric gets done farming, he has to go to the gin and help finish ginning cotton.

We gin about 56,000 bales of cotton a year. Pretty big operation, so there's not a lot of time for this in the fall. So what if we don't get in the farm in the fall? We do it in the spring and that's a video of it rolling along with it. You see it lifting and fracturing that ground. That's why we like to do it in the fall to get that fracture. You see how red that dirt is? I bet y'all ain't never seen dirt that red. All right. Right hybrid on the right dirt. A lot of these hybrids fail because you make them fail.

I tell people all the time, we have choices. You hear the people, somebody, I say something to somebody, they say, "Well, I didn't have a choice." Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did. All of us as human have choices. The choices we make have consequences. You make a bad choice on the street, you go to jail, you make a bad choice here, you fail. We rate our farms every year before we start and all these hybrids change. We know they don't last long. We get a good one, man, we got a good one. They jerk it away from us, so we got to find a new one. We get on a whiteboard in our shop, we write down all of our farms. We categorize them. One to five. I don't go one to 10, one to five. Keep it simple. We rate it on horsepower, meaning fertility, color of dirt, disease, insect and drying out erosion, whatever I can think of off the top of my head.

But them first three are the big major ones and then we go one, two, three, four, five. One meaning less, five meaning high and that's how we figure out. Then we get our hybrids out that we're going to use that year and I read them and I study them and I figure out which one's going to work in this environment the best and I write that one down and that's the one we go with. Now kid me, I have probably 50 something farms. You guys ought to be blessed. Y'all don't know how well y'all do have it made. I'm telling you, our biggest field is 75 acres. I drive up through here and y'all got 183 hundreds and I'm like, "Really?" So guess what Eric does after every 50 or every 30, or every 25 or every five? Yeah, we have five and three acre fields. I have two generators, two shop-vacs and four trash cans with me.

If the next farm we're going to calls for hybrid B, we suck hybrid A out, put it in the trash bins, put a top on it, we put hybrid B in. If the next one calls for hybrid C, we do the same process over and over. Each farm gets a different hybrid. There's no way that I can go through here and plant all hybrid A, skip this farm, go over here, go to this county, go to the next county. So we plant them as we come to them just like cleaning them up. Because y'all saw the tracks on everything. I'm not running up down the highway at 20 mile an hour going from Alabama to Tennessee, Alabama to Tennessee. So that's how we put the right hybrid on the right soil and if you do that, I promise you, you are going to see results. I cannot stress this enough guys.

And a lot of the hybrid companies, they don't really foreclose this a lot, but it's up to us to figure this and you wonder, "Hey Eric, how'd you figure all this out?" There was no playbook. I've been growing corn for five or six years now. I have several NCGA first place in multiple states. I hold the Alabama dry land record today that hasn't been broken three years. 316 bushel. Hasn't been contested, no income close the same year we went 329 bushel in Tennessee and was done with a decaf hybrid, 67 44, both of them. And both of them was planted at 38,000. We all know the corn plants is a product of what? Yields a product of what? [inaudible 00:12:16] Bingo.

Those other are important, but the one he said is very important. Population. Plants per acre. Okay, do I plant my whole farm in 38,000? Hell no. My average pop is 32,500. When I'm trying to break a record, I bump it up to 38,000. Know your limits, push them. Push the limits of these hybrids, okay. But believe me, if you going to plant 38,000, you better have 38,000 plant food out there or it's going to fail and in the meeting before this we was talking about planters and that's why I talk about in for a two-by-two everything. It's the whole package. You've got to run it out. You are leaving a lot of meat on the bone if you don't have in for a two-by-two on the planter. I mentored some guys this year. This is the first time I ever stepped into this. I'm mentoring a couple of guys and both of them come back to me this year. I tried to get them to add two-by-two on the planter they had inferal and guess what both of them said about a month ago?

"I wish I would've listened to you." Because they saw results out of the in for a program that I give them and I said, "You're never going to get to your [inaudible 00:13:34] because you don't have two-by-two." They're close. They can see it. They seeing the visual difference. We like things with our eyes, not our hands. Our eyes. They can see the results that I've taught them this year through the inferal program, but I said, "I'm going to go ahead and tell you you'll never get there because you don't have two-by-two on your planter." Two-by-two lets you separate that nitrogen application throughout the year. The nitrogen curve, I discussed it in here just a few minutes ago. It doesn't open its mouth to V-ten and it takes it all.

It needs very little at planning. I want just enough, just enough to set ringset at V-five to where that corn plant isn't stressed at V-five. I guess I got a little bit ahead of myself, but we're going to go ahead and cover this anyhow. So like I said, high yields are plants per acre, range anywhere from 29,000 38-5. Beans, yes, that come directly out of the road. 110,000 on 30 inch rows. No seed company is going to tell you to plant 110,000 on soybeans, not a one. All of them wanted 180. Guys, that's the rates that the guys I used to work for was planting in the late eighties and nineties.

Yes, it is a quarter laying on the stalk of corn that me and Tommy cut off about a month ago. That's the diameter of our corn stalks. Notice how healthy that corn stalk is around that edge. You see that picket fence stand? That is 38,000 planted right there. Plant or prep. I just got out of a room on this deal right here. This is the most important step. You get it wrong here, you will pay for it. I want y'all to repeat that last part right here. If you get it wrong-

You'll pay for it all year.

That has never been no more true. I had an old timer tell me one time, he said, "If you're going to screw up somewhere, screw up somewhere else, not here." And that stuck with me and it will stick with me until the day I die. This first picture, we worked on this planter all year or all winter during the winter months. We totally redone it. Got out here in the back lot. My shop sitting about right here. We got out here in the back lot and this picture's from a couple years ago. I know it don't have the right closing wheels. I want to showed you a few minutes ago, this pictures a couple years old, but we drug this back and forth, back and forth. I had one row that was skipping, doubling, skipping and doubling. I took the meter off. I got a precision down there five minutes from my house. I run the meter down there, he retested, comes back a hundred percent perfect.

Come back, put it back on. Does the same thing. Skipping and doubling, skipping and doubling. I said, "Take this meter off, put it over here. Put this one over here." Skipping and doubling, skipping and doubling. I said, "Pull the down meter off. It's in the seed tube." That was inside the seed tube. That is the little triangle bracket that wedges down in front of a Keaton seed-bed firmer bracket to get the pitch right on the seed-bed firmer. One of us had accidentally dropped that down in the seed tube. Them seed was bouncing off of that, causing it to skip and double, skip and double. Now, how many farmers would've planted their whole crop and not known that that was doing that? Because on the meter, even though I had a precision meter, it was saying, "Hey, we're good. Let's go."

Until I got out and dug behind this planter and saw that one row skipping and doubling, skipping and doubling, skipping and doubling, that would've cost a lot of money over 3000 acres on one row. It also would've cost me one, two, three, four first places in NCGA that year and that's just a video of us. This is how we check it right here. You see how I've dug back? We see every seed, you see every seed, every seed's got a flag. That's 17 foot, five inches, that's 100th of an acre and 30 inch rows. They don't just run out of flags. Now then, once we did that row, guess how many rows is on that planter?

We do them all. That's how we caught that problem right there. You do them all. Remember guys, when you're trying to create these high yields and believe me, it takes these high yields for us to pay anymore. I mean pay the bankers, pay the land notes. For me it's to keep the power on. You have to know. Hoping doesn't win championships. Guessing doesn't win championships, close enough doesn't win championships. You have to know. You have to know a hundred percent for sure that you're spot on and you can do it. I just had to break my own mentality. I was one of them guys. Hey, close is good enough. What am I, freaking hand grenade, pull the pin out and it doesn't rest? No, so I changed that mentality overnight. Went from 170 something bushel one year to 285 the next and our quest right now is 400 bushel.

I've seen it harvested. Never put it on a truck and scaled it because that's what NCGA requires you to do. You harvest one acre, you put it on a truck, you scale it and that's your number. And believe me, I have people in my community all the time, "Oh man, I'm making 300 bushel corn." No you're not. You're a damn liar. I know how hard it is to make 300 bushel corn when you break that 275. I don't know what it is about that number, but when you break the 275 mark, every bushel thereafter is a knock-down, drag-out cat fight. It is very difficult to obtain two more bushel. Last year we experienced the worst drought we experienced the same thing y'all experienced. This time our last year the combines were done running at home. Corn was this high, no ears on it. Insurance cut a lot of it down and made us harvest it.

You look in the mirror, the combine was quiet. You look in the mirror, no chafe coming out the back. I made 175 bushel across the whole farm. I was coming home mad, upset, frustrated and my wife's like, "Look, can you quit beating yourself up?" I said, "Beat myself up? We're not making anything." She said, "No." She sits over there in that gin office and she hears all the coffee shop, you know all the farmers come through. They's making 60 bushel and I made 175, but it was all the management practice that we'd done that created that. This is a picture of our parallel arms. We rebuilt them this winter. It's a job. 24 row. I ended up how many holes we did, it's like 400 something holes we drilled. Took exactly seven days of nothing but hole drilling was the best investment I ever put on a planter. That kit, I think it was from Precision Planter Solutions. You use your old arms, you ream them out, you put a bushing in it. It's a bushing inside of a bushing. Best money I ever spent.

Cost you about, what is it, 400 something dollars a row. If you buy their arms, you can do the kit for like 80 bucks or something like that, but you have to drill the holes. All right, let's jump on fertility. I don't believe in dry fertilizer. I know where it's drilled till conference. I don't believe in dry fertilizer. Dry fertilizer is toxic to the soil and this is my opinion. I'm entitled to it. Don't care what y'all think. I'm playing the fifth on this one. Come to my place and argue me differently. Dry fertilizer belongs on the dinner table. That's a form of salt. Salt is super toxic to the ground guys. When y'all leave and go home, I want y'all to mix you up some salty hot water in a bottle. Go out in your wife's pretty green lawn, pour that water out and write your name in it when you're pouring it out. Come back three days later and tell me what happens. Anybody want to guess what happens?

The grass dies.

Bingo. Youngest man in the room called y'all out right there. The grass dies. What do you think it's doing? What do you think it's doing to the microbes in the soil? We don't have anhydrous where I'm at. We use all liquid 32 or 28, either one. Pick your choice. I'm glad we don't have anhydrous because as careless as I am, I'll probably be up here blind right now. I know how bad that stuff is with blindness and all that, but even where we ban these nutrients behind the planter, we come back three, four, five, six days later, you can actually see where it's kind of messed the up right there. I'll sacrifice that, but I'm not sacrificing my whole field by strong fertilizer all over it. I'd rather have it concentrated in a hundred percent band. I tell people all the time, I farm six inches, we're on 30 inch rows. That 25 or 24 in the middle, I don't give a rat's rear end about. It's holding the world together.

I'm worried about the six inches on that plant. That's why we run that inline ripper on RTK. Then we come back with that planter and we set that planter down right on top of that rip section. Those roots have nothing but loose, straight down channel to grow in, straight up. But to make things even better, this chicken litter, we're blessed to have probably 60 or 70 chicken houses right around my little operation. Big chicken farms. Well, guess what? They got to go somewhere with all of this. We use a hundred percent chicken litter. I am very stickler on what type of litter. We have broiler litter, we have egg litter. Jason Webster tapped on the room over a while ago, early this morning and I was the one that said the comment, "What do you get from eggs?" I was the one that said calcium. You know why I knew calcium?

Because you used to use egg litter. But what I wasn't getting from the egg. Litter was consistency. Egg litter is very wet. This blob that flies over there may not be the same blob that flies over there as far as consistency. We send a sample this off every year, every farm that it comes off of. It never comes off the same farm twice. Every farm it comes off of. We send an analysis off. You have to have a baseline to know where you're even at, guys. There is 70 units of nitrogen in that litter that's coming off that truck right there. Now, am I counting seven units? Hell no. No, because by the time I apply this, the time I plant, a lot of time has a elapsed, so I give it about depending on rainfall, I judge rainfall into the equation and this is just my crazy equation.

There's no mathematical book for this. I go by rainfall, I go by temperature. I say hard. Well, we probably lost 25% of that or we may have lost 50% of it, so then I adjust my rates from that point on. But you just got to kind of use some common sense about this because I've tested the same truck load them get a different answer every time. That's what I'm saying. It's so inconsistent that you're going to have to use a little common sense about it. So what I normally put anywhere from one ton to two ton to four tons depending on the farm I'm trying to fix. I can take this and make a bad farm look good and that's us unloading it off and we'll buy anywhere from seven, 8,000 tons a year.

Proper seed-bed prep. This is very crucial too because much like Jason Webster touched on, I am leaving from here Monday and I'm going to Precision Planting to their field day. I'm going to be part of it. We're going to be filming an episode there for crop critic and so I know a lot about what goes on in Precision and this and that. I work pretty close with them. I bought a new vertical tillage tool this year, a 2660 VT that Deer put out on the market. It is hands down one of the best tools I've ever bought from Deer.

You want that seed-bed to be smooth and firm. You don't want your planter sinking in the ground. Big no-no. Everybody thinks, "Oh man, that ground's mellow. We're going to get a good stand here." No you're not. No you're not. You're going to have going to have so many air pockets in it. There's no way you can beat it all out. We plant in a stale seed-bed, no matter whether it's strip tilling or conventional till or no-till. It better rain on it and then we're going to plant it. I want it stale. Everybody see this corner right here? You see where it's hitting that tractor? This is probably, I think I took that picture in the middle of June. That corn is living off of nothing but what was on the planter only. This didn't even have litter put on it. It's running up solely off the fertility off of this planter. Like I said, this is 32 with sulfur and that right there is Levitate with accomplish max.

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Biologicals. Boy, we can start a pissing match here. I got off on this spiel here about four years ago, three years ago, man, everybody had a bug and a jug. There's even one called bug and a jug, [inaudible 00:31:02] makes it. It's called bugs and a jug. Do you know how many bugs we have in our own soil? Thousands. Do you know what they do in the wintertime? They go dormant. They wake up in the springtime when that soil temperature hits the right temperature and then they wake up. I'm going to warn you guys, and I learned this the hard way. Please don't make these hard knocks like I did. I failed a lot guys. And when I say I failed, I failed miserably. When you introduce another colony of bugs into the bugs that you already have in your soil, you will kill off the bugs that you have in your soil already.

Put two tomcats in a cage and shut the gate. One of them is going to fight to the death. Remember, we're not right. Your bugs will be the same way. I promise you. I guarantee you. I did not realize this until I did it and that was the Maylocks moment. Aha. No more bugs in the jugs. That's why we run Accomplish Max. Accomplish Max is from Agerson. I had the privilege of touring Agerson this winter. I went to their R&D lab. I had to wear goggles like the nerd geek, white coat. I saw the love in those scientists eyes, how they cared for this product, these products that they were putting out and care that they had. They had wheat, they had corn, they had cotton.

They had a few other things there, but they were coming in and they were putting exact amount of this stuff on these and had them in a controlled environment and you could see the results in front of your eyes and I was sold and I'd been running Accomplish Max for two years now, but Accomplish Max wakes your biology up. Nothing more, nothing less. It goes in for great product, great product. I keep all my low salt stuff in the trench. All my high salt stuffs goes right here and comes out on both sides of the road through the conceal. I started managing salts two years ago and my yields went up, up, up. I had nobody to show me all this. How many of you, I want to say a raise of hands. How many of you understand the physiology of corn plant? Truly understand the physiology of a corn plant. That's what I expected to see. How many of you, and I'm not going to call you out on this, but y'all been growing corn all your life?

What if I go to the doctor to have brain surgery and I look over and there's a knee surgeon. I said, "Hey, knee surgeon, can you work on my brain?" To know how to grow corn, guys, you got to understand corn physiology. That's what I done. Guess where I found it? We all got a thousand dollars iPhone in our pocket. That's serious. That heifer knows everything. Seriously. I Googled it, because I had no college. I've not been to college. I'm a first generation farmer, so I Googled it because people like Missy Bower, Jason Webster, all these people are smarter than me and you. That's why they get paid the big bucks. That's why they run around here in a white company vehicle. And believe me, if you want to know how to be successful, guys, go to somebody that is successful and ask them. They're probably not going to tell you the first time you're going to go back, but go back.

Go back. If they don't tell you that time, go back again. Guess what? They're eventually going to tell you how they were successful. You be honest with people, guys, and you're willing to learn, they see that and they will tell you. If we go to our grave with these secrets, Marion said it yesterday in his presentation. If we go to our grave with these secrets as people like this young man going to know how to farm? That's what we're here for. Farming is so cutthroat. I don't know if it is up here in y'all's area but mine, oh man. They'll run a knife in your back and twist it, but it's so cutthroat. Uncle Luther over, he ain't going to tell you what he'd done to go 400 bushel of corn, but I'm going to send a private investigator over and I'm fixing to find out. I can promise you that. That corn was from last year.

Anybody want to take a stab at what that corn made? Take an aspect that we had a drought last year. Zero. Never pollinated. It was pretty as you ever seen, man, we was getting rain and then all of a sudden it shut off and it didn't rain again until August, I think August the 10th or something like that. Never pollinated. Crop management. Randy Doughty, he used to say this right here, if you look him up, if you look him up, and I have to admit, Randy Doughty is one of the guys that I looked up to years ago when I first started corn farming. When you Google, I think I Googled at the time growing high yield corn. Guess who popped up first? Randy Doughty.

I think that was the year he went three-hundred and something in Georgia, got his name put on the map and the rest is history from that point on. He always says, "Be a student of the crop." The crop is telling you... I used to tissue sample all the time and I got sick and tired of going out every Monday morning, whether it was pouring down rain, hot, snowing, whatever hell. And pulling tissue samples because what would happen was I'd get the tissue sample Wednesday morning, I'd get a re-mail. Well, you're low on boron, you're low on manganese, and I say, all right. I call Nutrien. We get boron, we get manganese. We go out Friday, we spray it, we pull the sample again next Monday. Guess what? The needle's still where it was. So we do it again. The needle's still where it was the next week, so fine. It just quitted.

You don't need a tissue sample to tell you where your crop is. If you front load everything up front, you don't have to chase it all year long. If you don't remember nothing else out of my little old spiel, remember this, be proactive. You can never play catch-up no matter what it's disease, nutrient deficiency, whatever. You can never go back in time. If somebody wants to build me a time machine, build it. I'll invest on it right now. Be proactive. Tissue sampling, it'll lead you on a witch hunt. That's what I call it, a witch hunt. The crop. People wonder how I can read the crop, but I can look at the leaves and tell what's going on the crop. Just like Marion gave his presentation yesterday. I'm going to use him a lot because he is a good friend of mine. Y'all saw his presentation where he talked about potash and potassium deficiencies, dead giveaways in the leaves. I see people on Facebook all the time.

They're talking about, "Oh man, I got this streaking in my leaves." You see them. They're all torn to pieces and about to cry and I'm like, "Dude, you're an idiot." When you see those streaking in leaves and they're pretty in green you ever seen, all that is that leaf is out running the nutrients that are coming up from the bottom, the corn's growing faster than it can uptake the nutrients that is in a row, that is the diameter of my corn consistently. We focus a lot on fungicides and stress mitigation. Fungicides do two things. This is before I knew about this other part right here. Fungicides make corn happy. Did y'all know that? They not only protect it from disease, they take stress off of it. I apply four fungicide passes.

We go out after we plant the corn, it comes up. I try to get on it when it's like this to clean it up. I damn sure don't want to be spraying it V-five because you don't want no stress on that corn at V-five because guess what's going to happen it around. You want to get your post spray out of the way, get the stress off that corn, let that corn be sitting out there happy and go lucky at V-five. We put a half a rate of fungicide on with our post spray half a rate and I use Triva Pro from start to finish. Triva Pro, I'm probably fixing to make some bear guys mad, but I'm going to tell you the God honest truth, Triva Pro is the only one that will stop Southern rust dead in its tracks.

Valtima season four Corn Warriors. Guess what? O'Rourke had to use Beltima. Guess what happened? Failed. Season five rolled around. I'm out the day you come in my farm and tell me what I can and can't use. I'm done. Triva Pro has never failed us. Never. I don't care. It's a group three. Has three different modes of action. You can look it up, Adastro, whatever from Epson. See, that's the new one of theirs. I got some of it this year. We're taking a look at it. It's three modes of same. Three modes of action. Will that stop Southern rust? I don't know. We do a lot with Southern rust. Two years ago I got it come up in on me off Hurricane Ian and they got three of my NCGA entries. They didn't make nothing. Southern rust. And they also blowed them on the ground too, but stress mitigation. Guys, there's products out here sole purposely on stress mitigation. I would advise you guys to look into them.

Aggerson makes one of the best ones. It's called Terramar. If you have a pencil and paper, I would advise you to write it down. Terramar, put it out of the court to the acre anytime, but watch the weather. If you see a big hot event coming, get it on it. Get in front of the curve. The stuff works. I'll stand behind it all day long every day. This corn had three applications of Terramar on it. That's what created that big old stalk. I took three different stress events that we had off of that crop. There's some other ones, Kelpene, anything and the whole, the product behind the stress mitigation is Kelp. Anybody know what Kelp is?

Seaweed. There's a lot of it, [inaudible 00:44:05] but there is a way that it's processed that separates it from stress mitigator, snake oil learned that one the hard way too. I got a product called Kelpene. Snake oil. Even had kelp on the jug, but it was the way it was processed that screwed it up. I'm going to say a term here and I mean this. Seriously, when y'all are looking at these companies, there's a lot of these companies out here, these snake oil salesmen. If you think it's made in somebody's bathtub, it probably is, guys. I would advise you if they come to your farm and say, "Hey bud, how about taking me to your research department?" If they openly take you to your research department, that's a pretty good chance. It's good stuff. If they say, "No, man, I'm booked up, or..." Bathtub oil bull crap. I wouldn't say something else, but we got some younger ears in here. Bathtub bull crap.

Carry the crop all the way to maturity. Guys, let's go back on beans. Look, these are 13-inch beans planted 110,000. Do you know how we get this branching effect? Wrong. I manipulate them. 30 inch beans planted 110,000. Remember, I said a while ago, beans do not make enough nitrogen on their own to obtain the yield goal that we're trying to obtain. We're trying to create a hundred bushel of beans. Now, that's the norm. I put 20 units of nitrogen down through my conceal at planting. The reason I do that is because I know that beans don't make enough nitrogen on their own. I inoculate my beans with a seed trainer. Then I run another inoculant inferal. I double inoculate them. Then I put 20 units down beside them and don't ever think that you need to wide drop beans. I failed miserably. They didn't make that was a no-no.

Never do it again. Beans are lazy creatures by norm. Them and cotton is just like they're lazy. They're lazy animals. You spray something on it, you can't see it visually, they don't react. We let these beans get up to the fifth trifoliate, the fifth trifoliate. They have to be at the fifth. They can be at the third, but we pace our fields. Tommy knows this. Tommy works for me. He's sitting out there. Every day we're walking the field. We're checking beans, checking beans, checking beans. They're at the second today. We'll come back tomorrow. They're at the third. How many are at the third? Well, here's some at the fifth over here.

Well, everything else stops on the farm. I spray these beans and I don't disclose this or recommend this, but I'm just telling you what I do. I spray these beans with Cobra, Cobra, Ultra Blazer, Prefix, Roundup, Ingenia, Crop oil and some kind of insecticide. Yeah, turn your phone off and I make sure it's 85 degrees for the next three or four days. We smoke them, but what that does, we do it in the cotton world. Okay? I know a lot of y'all are not familiar with cotton, but we pick cotton. We put a plant regulator on cotton to stunt the growth to make it fruit. Well, there is no picks and for beans, so I come up with my own.

When you spray that cobra and stuff on those beans, it makes it tricks its mentality to go, huh, we're hurt. So we put on more limbs, more limbs, more pods. Me and my wife sat down and we counted. We pulled every pod off that there was 186 pods on that one plant and every one of them was three to four bean pods. Those beans, I think they made 87 bushel in the same field right here where I pulled this one, I'd done a population trial from 50,000 to 110,000. I raised it, 10,000 there all the way up across this field. One planter passed. We cut it, we scaled it, we weighed it. Does anybody want to know how many bushel was different between all of them? Five bushel. 75,000 was a three to one return, meaning I give you $1, you're going to give me three back that's making money. I don't know what banker y'all use, but he going to like that.

We also desiccated these beans and I've got an elevator just one mile down the road with something happening at the elevator. They couldn't take them, so we had to wait until the follow Monday will Hurricane Ian come through the same? 60,000 plants per acre was the only one standing straight up. The rest of them were lodged after Hurricane Eden. We all know what happens when beans lodge, there was 18 to 20 bushel gone. So I'm telling you guys, you're planting these beans too thick and I know I'm from the south and I know I can get away with a lot more than y'all can, but I also have Facebook and I saw all y'all planting in April when I thought it was crazy as heck.

I saw these planters rolling up here, guys. So y'all understand that planting beans early, there's a big yield bump there. I'd advise you to knock in populations down. I'm telling you, I even went to a 56 hole plate from Precision Planting. It's nothing but a single row of holes around through there. Spacing on beans is more crucial than it is on corn. Did everybody hear that? It's very crucial. After we try to get our space to about every two inches, we'll go back to the planter right quick. I set a Coca-Cola can on the back of my planter of a morning. The can better be sitting there when I get off at night.

That goes back to ride quality ground prep. Do it right the first time. You ain't going to go back. I had to replant cotton all the time. That's part of the cotton world. Marion says that a couple of times and some of the things he says, "If you do it right the first time, you ain't got to do it again." In the cotton world, you don't always get a stand of cotton. I mean, we plant the stuff a half inch deep. That's the deep as we plant it. Tell a corn guy, go plant something two inches deep. I like to had a stroke the first year. I wore out three pocket knives, six screwdrivers and seven seed diggers. Never planted nothing two inches deep in my life.

Those plants are 38,000. Look at the root ball. Did y'all hear the one earlier on when the plants are tighter together that the root mass is smaller? What do you think? No. I'm calling bull crap on that one. You feed that plant. Remember, where I'm from we got a big lake right next door. Million dollar homes. Billion dollar really? People like Alan Jackson, Cain Brown, they got homes on this lake right next door to us. They built a foundation like that to put them big, nice, big homes on to where they don't fall off in that lake. Same way with this corn plant. It's more important what's going on down here than what's going on up here. Build this factory up, guys. You want that root mass? That's a picture of our cotton after it's been sprayed and opened up and defoliated. This cotton gets the same treatment as these beans. These beans get the same treatment as this corn. They all get two-by-two, inferal. The whole program. Wide dropped everything. We just changed the formulas per crop.

Good stuff from Eric Reed there. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks to our sponsor once again, Yetter Farm Equipment for making this series possible .and hey, I hope to see you at our next Strip Till conference. July 31st in Iowa City. We're putting together a program right now. Really excited about it. Head to striptillconference.com for more information. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.