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A “green and growing crop” is often perceived as a visual validation of a healthy no-till system. But subsurface investigation is wise to truly understand the biological stability of your soils for long-term success, says Brad Forkner. In the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by NewFields Ag, the seasoned agronomist will explain how to decipher soil biology and soil moisture profiles and utilize the information to determine when to quit on a crop or when to pump it up with biologicals, plant growth regulators, nitrogen and much more.

         
           

         
           

The No-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by NewFields Ag.

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor of No-Till Farmer. In the latest edition, brought to you by NewFields Ag, seasoned agronomist, Brad Forkner will explain how to decipher soil biology and soil moisture profiles and utilize the information to determine when to quit on a crop or when to pump it up with biologicals, plant growth regulators, nitrogen and more. Brad will share tips and suggestions on when to make in-season adjustments with inputs based on soil moisture, and also share his review of cutting-edge inputs and tools that will deliver big-time ROI for no-tillers. So with that, let's listen in on Brad's discussion.

So residue takes a certain amount of nitrogen to break it down, right? So we can either do that in the fall or we can do that in the spring, or are we letting that compete with the new crop? And that's always a choice. And the more residue we have, the more competition we're going to have. So why do I like doing residue management in the fall? It's not just about the recycle process, it's about the disease.

If there was any disease out there, why in the world would I want to give that a free house and free food source all winter to come back and bite me again and give me a carbon penalty? There's also the people that have excess nitrogen left over in the fall. Some of the high-yield guys. Some of them that abuse nitrogen. One of them asked me one day, he says, "I'm thinking about putting some wood chips out. What do you think about that?" He said, "But the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio is 25. Now, we want to be closer to 15."

I say, "Well, would you rather that excess nitrogen you've abused all year, would you rather that eat wood chips or organic matter?" So there's not one right answer on a lot of these things. I was interested yesterday listening to my young guy from... Mr. Kincaid from Jasper, Missouri. That's south of where I grew up. I grew up southwestern Missouri down around that Nevada area. So for somebody else to ask him, so what happened when you put the biologicals out there?

Well, this guy has been running cow manure. This guy has probably been running a lot of diversity through the cover crops and all. His answer is going to be different than somebody who's doing none of that. So where one man said that didn't work at my house, that wasn't his short barrel stave. Too many companies are out here with one product and they want to be sure they're heard. That is not part of a symphony. There are multiple things that go into what goes on.

I work with a third generation Cherokee medicine man. First time I'm talking to him for 15 minutes. He says, "Your blood pressure is up. You've had a little angina attack the last 30 days and you're short of copper. Do you know that?" I said, "How about I'm toxic on zinc because people start coughing? I start popping zinc. I bet I got my copper and zinc ratio out of whack." Same thing we do in this all, right? Last time I had breakfast with him, he said, "What did you do to your calcium?"

I said, "Mama told me to go check out the rosacea. They put me on antibiotics for three weeks and told me to stay away from the calcium. You're going to tell me it's going to start pulling out of my bones." He said, "No, I'm going to tell you it's already affecting the way that your nerves fire. How many people thought about calcium as being part of your nervous system or part of the electronic grid?

So I said, if you're telling me that that is in fact a true story or true statement, does that mean that all my low pH ground is not doing as good a job of communications with the biology end of the surface? He said, "You're starting to learn something kid." What does move electricity, iron, copper, aluminum, water, silica, magnesium, lithium? Anything that has to do with batteries or computers or moving electronics is not just a micronutrient. It's also part of a communication grid. We've had two or three people talking about how things join together.

If you believe the redox people then if the frequencies don't line up, you can put everything you want next to that plant. It's not going to get in, right? This is a whole lot more involved than I thought when I first decided I wanted to get into the nutrition business.

I was listening to Greg Brown the other day and he said, "It's the process, not the product." How many times has somebody told you you do this at V5. "Throw the fungicide, you'll get five bushel." Next guy says, "Throw the nutrition in there, you'll get five bushel." Next guy says, "We're getting ready to sit for optimum. Let's kick a little nitrogen out there. You'll get five bushel." Are we going to get 15? That's not the way it works.

There was an energy demand coming and if you are doing nothing, anything you do is going to get you that first four or five bushel. But that doesn't mean that everything you do is going to get you five more because chances of everybody's whatever they're wanting to give you for five bushel, you may not be short of that.

So we're going to talk a little bit about soil structure. Anybody here from Nebraska? Good. I can tell my Nebraska story. I'm out of Kearney. Guy has been a no-teller for 15 years, irrigated. He's sitting there at the meeting. He says, "My water is not going in the ground." Was anybody at the no-till meeting when Dana Dines and Dan Och talked eight, 10 years ago, talked about humics one time. USDA Ag Research Services, Ames, Iowa. I stopped in there because I worked guys between Hermann and Emerson, Missouri on the south side of Missouri River.

We used to say when it went over the levee that that was the 100-year flood until it did it four times in 10 years. And I don't know what we call it except 25 foot of water is a of compaction, right? So I went in and I talked to him. I said, "What am I going to do to address 25 foot of water?" He said, "Well, you're partially right." He said, "It doesn't have to be flooded to make a difference. If ground is saturated, we have two plus iron, which is my friend. It's kind of like glue on a paperback book. Helps hold our aggregates together."

We have three plus iron. The three pluses are not my friends, whether it's the iron, whether it's excess magnesium, whether it's aluminum. All of those take bonds up on my clay particle. That irregardless of the PH, makes it harder for the air or the water, the roots and all to go down, let the exudates out. So once we can open that up, and one way to do that is to take some dry humic because it can bond with an anion or a cation. I'm using a product now that's called Growthful. It's a tydronium. I've heard of hydronium, H3Os. Tydronium is H21O10.

So every time you have a drop of that, you've got 10 times the hydrogen, you have 10 times the oxygen you're releasing. So those will slowly release those hydrogens and start breaking loose some of those heavy metals that I can capture, that I can shrink the size of the clay colloid so that I can start letting air, water and roots go down.

Once we open that up, now we have more aerobic activity going on. The roots go farther down. The more they go down, the more the exudates go down. The more the exudates go down with the sugars and the food sources, the more the biology picks up. Biology picks up the worms start multiplying faster and that's competitive exclusion. I start winning. So what was going on with this guy with the, "I can't get water in my ground." He had saturated that ground so many times. His iron two plus took off on him.

Now the clays are laying flat like sheets of paper and he basically has a surface plow pan. And this is another one of my Missouri stories. I said, "Sir, where I come from and you put all your salty fertilizer on top of the ground, you put all your calcium on top of the ground and calcium and chloride get together. We call that concrete." So if you've got a concrete layer on top of a surface plow pan, why are you asking me why the water won't go through it?

Anytime we have a plow pan and the water doesn't go down, what else doesn't go down? Any leftovers. So we got leftover insecticide, leftover herbicide, leftover fungicide. All of that goes down to where it can't go any farther. And then when my roots get down to it, what are they eating? Something not very nice. So I'm not here to badmouth tillage. Not bad mouth tillage. I'm telling you that those are things that we need to understand and deal with. How are we going to raise a good crop if we don't understand what's going on below it?

Talk about numbers and ratios for a minute. How many people here have a clue what their base saturation of hydrogen is? There you go. Why does that matter? If I have high calcium and I have no hydrogens left, how am I going to lower the pH? Hard to do. I got a soil sample sent to me the other day on 33 acres. I had 30 pole points. We had base saturations of hydrogen there of 18. We had base saturations of zero. We had sulfurs at 10 and 12. We had sulfurs at 20s.

We had phosphorus in there, 18, 20, 25. We had phosphorus in there at 45. So if I'm out there with my leaf scanner and I'm starting to give you all these things that I'm reading and you're saying, "I think that thing's goofy. It's just all over the place." Guess what? Sometimes your ground's all over the place. We'll get into that in a minute. How much water is into soil? Did a little work with NutraDrip Netafim this year.

Very eye-opening because they introduced me to the concept of the clay flower pot. Hole in the bottom, right? Fill that full of dry dirt. Figure out by how much water it's going to take to fill half of it. Dye that bright red. Pour it in, give it 40 minutes. While you're doing that, build something bright yellow. Pour the bright yellow in on top of the red. Now we know because the pot gets smaller at the bottom, we're going to have excess water, right? It's going to run through. What color is that water? Red, yellow.

What color comes out in the bottom? Don't say orange. I was wrong. Red took every bonding site that was available as far as it could go. When the yellow came in, there was nothing to grab ahold of. Went straight through the red looking for something to hang onto. Now why does that matter? Was it wet in Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota this spring? And as soon as they got anyways close to fit, was it time to go out there and get that side dress UAN out there because we're behind?

And if the top was wet, where'd that UAN go? Below the root zone. So at that point we should have foliard some or waited for it to dry. Current water. I have 40 flash drives. I have more people than that here. If you don't get one, put your name down. I will email you the set of slides because I'm not going to go through all of them. The more people I listened to yesterday, the more subjects I want to cover that aren't on the slides because I never rehearse anything anyway.

This was interesting with the no-till age, and the plow and the whatever. But I can show you a guy that they've no-till for 15 years and he has less than 2% organic matter. How can that be? No oxygen? No biology? Something going on, right? Reduced branch and thicker roots. When you talk about auxins and cytokines, one gets me more roots, one gets me more up. So when it's going out of vegetation into reproduction, what do I want? Do I want more roots or do I want more growth up top? More roots.

Now it's time to fill it. So I like to introduce just a little bit of a plant growth regulator in there because this plant says I'm thinking about quit growing so much up here and getting ready to feed that new growth. No different than being in the livestock business. And when a cow is not pregnant, she's an estrogen dominant, right? Once she's pregnant, she is progesterone because we're dividing all the energy to the new life. So send that little bit of signal, that little bit of PGR that says, "You're getting ready to go into reproduction. Good call." Don't take all of your energy away from the plant, but let's get more of the energy going up to it.

Talked about this just a little bit. We had a guy that you can now get a system that you can separate the liquid from the manure and your dairy barns and your pig barns. You can run it through that buried tape. Well, once Iowa quit raining, it turned dry for about six weeks. So this guy says, "Good deal. I got this tape out here. I'm going to start watering these beans, except to put seven inches on in August." What'd he do? Got rid of all his oxygen. Ended up raising less than if he'd left it alone.

When water is on a nitrogen molecule, it can break down because we're sugar factories. They keep pulling those waters off to have enough HNO to make those sugars. So the people like me that believe that humics are a good way to help stabilize nitrogen, when the water leaves and you can put a carbon bond on there, whether it's the humics, or the molasses, some kind of a sugar bond, there is no breakdown because there's no water on it. But also we haven't killed anybody. So it's natural stabilization. Don't overdo it.

Soil sensing methods. One of the things, and I'll get into it here in a minute that I worked with, is a buried water probe. Anybody use water probes? Permanent? When it's permanent, we know how the water's recharged over the whole year because it takes about 30 days for that water probe to settle in and start. So when they first had them out and you put them in the spring, you took them out in the fall. You actually lost 30 days of knowing where you are.

Does a buried water probe be in southwest Kansas where I don't irrigate make any sense? I say yes because if I know going into the year and we're in the middle of a multi-year drought, how much water do I have down there? How much crop will that grow me? Do I need to adjust my input dollars? Do I need to adjust my population? Do I need to hit it hard with kelp and make those leaves as big as I can so I can still capture 90% of the sunlight but not feed as many plants to do it? I had a guy in South Dakota explain to me that the overuse one time of a kelp, he had elephant ears on his beans for the rest of the year. So I tried that.

I went out and I took some paramagnetic rock and put it on some pumpkins this year and I took an over-sized dose of kelp. I had pumpkin leaves 15 inches across all year. The other thing the buried water probe says is we went down to here in the daytime. We slept. We went down here, we slept. We went here and slept. I can tell you exactly where my roots are. And if we know how our fertility changes as we go down those three and four inch increments, now we know is there something I can send down there to make that work better? I think we'll get to that point.

Plant biochemical sequence. Boron activates silicon, which carries all the other nutrients starting with calcium, which binds the nitrogen to form. Amino acids. Amino acids are the precursors of all my proteins, right? So the amino acids such as chlorophyll and tagged trace elements, especially magnesium transfers energy via the phosphorous, which also has a relationship. If you look at Moeller's chart, phosphorous has a big relationship with zinc and copper.

The other one that's on a different slide says phosphorous and zinc, especially zinc, has a relationship with how well my auxins work. Now we're going to take the carbons, make sugars, potassium then carries them. That's how one thing out of whack starts the dominoes falling that we didn't want to fall. That's when it became an aha moment to me that if my calcium is wrong way up there, how can I expect everything else to work?

We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our podcast sponsor, NewFields Ag. Farmers, are you ready to unleash the power of natural nitrogen efficiency? Meet N-Physis Nitrogen Fixer by NewFields Ag, the innovation that transforms how your crops fix and use nitrogen through the power of Envita. No more worrying about nitrogen losses to volatilization or leaching. N-Physis brings nitrogen in from the surrounding air, keeping the plant working and feeling robust growth. The result? Healthier plants, bigger yields and a better return on your investment. Whether it's corn, soybeans, or specialty crops, N-Physis Nitrogen Fixer delivers consistent proven results. Visit NewFieldsAg.com for details. NewFields Ag innovation in your fields. So with that, let's listen in on Brad's discussion.

Fungicide works for disease if you do it right. Fungicide also is a wonderful ethylene blocker. I would be more apt to prescribe or to advise to use a fungicide if I've got an ethylene gas coming up on me. And if I'm going to keep that alive another 10 or 12 days, why not have some fertility out there while I'm making that pass? Especially late in the season. Once we start grain fill, what do we need? Micronutrients and potassium. What if it hasn't rained for a while? Nitrogen and potassium have to have water to move, right? And if it's not moving, probably the roots aren't going toward it. That's where the bacteria that pulls nitrogen through the leaves comes in.

Whether it rains or whether it doesn't, I'm pulling nitrogen through that leaf. Soybeans quit nodulating, but they still have green leaves. I'm pulling nitrogen through the leaf every day. We did some things with watermelons. Plants typically will not imbibe more P&K than they need. They will way over induce on nitrogen. Personal preference to me says that when I see a bunch of brace roots, we have put too much nitrogen out at one time. It has over imbibed and has plugged those roots. It has thrown that new set of brace roots as a heart bypass.

One year for the Peoria farm show, I took loams, I took sands, and all these different things, and I put some different treatments in there, and I put seed over along the edge. I wanted to see early root development. I got into black sands. Anybody here farm black sands? They get tight. First time I'd done much with them. So when this stuff is growing up and I'm starting doing my first documentation, I have corn in them. Black sands spiked. They have not opened the leaf yet. They're spiked throwing brace roots. That little guy I already knew. If I'm going to make it in life, I'm going to need help. I had never looked at corn that close, that small to see that happen.

Anybody here know who a [inaudible 00:22:03] is. If you have iron chlorosis, they would be your friend. They will help knock the iron and the aluminum and the magnesium apart so that we have less trouble with that. Anybody here from around Mexico, Missouri? Anybody know why there were brick yards there that made bricks for the steel kilns. Towards enough aluminum in the clay, they didn't have to import it.

There's aluminum in Dalhart, Texas. There's an aluminum from Corpus Christi over through Robstown, Agua Dulce, and on over to Alice. We had iron chlorosis in grain sorghum. I was sitting there trying to figure out what the world is the white patches in the grain sorghum? Corn seems not to be quite as susceptible to it, so we weren't seeing it in the corn. So we took those [inaudible 00:22:56] down there along with that H21O10. We started taking care of it. We're talking about a grazing yesterday. One millimeter. That's 1cc of rumen fluid, 100 billion bacteria, 10 million protozoa, 10,000 fungi, and how many rumen bugs that cow carrying?

So what they didn't say was when them cows started eating those turnips and squirted, what were they doing? Shooting their gut biome. Were to bacteria light to grow? Lignans. Get some more lignans. Get some more roughage in that cow. Quit shooting it all out the back end. That's not in your best interest.

Plant growth regulations. If gibberellics make things grow tall, how long do we want to do that? Not very long in a bean plant, right? Because we don't want those nodules very far apart. The taller they get, the harder it is to keep something up. We had a guy that I worked with this year hit 130 busts of wheat. I don't want wheat tall. We're going to see if we can hit 150 and still keep enough stock in it that it doesn't fall over. Because I pushed some hard wheat one time and it bent and it started raining, and it started sprouting, and that was not a good idea.

Plant growth hormones. What do the gibberellics do? What do the auxins do? What do the cytokines do? What does the ethylene... I didn't realize that they were calling ethylene a PGR. Do not abuse those things. They can go out of whack as easily as they can do things. I will tell you that a lot of the high yield people will have some auxins out there every time they go to the field. They will have some boron out there every time they go to the field. Not a lot. Boron will not stand a plant. I saw some plant readings where we had the boron pushed to a hundred. Next week it's 13. 48 went to nine. I did not see it come up until we put some more in. So is it very important? Absolutely. Put a little out every time you're out there. But any excess is just like vitamin C. You'll get rid of it.

How about copper? What's good and bad about copper? Be toxic at high levels. Anybody have any issues with green snap ever? Interesting. Typically, I have some people that have green snap. Think about a bean cherry that's getting ready to go to the grocery store for table use. It's ready to pick. We're going to go tomorrow and we just got a two-inch rain. What happens? Cracks. If we have used a copper fungicide or have enough copper in that plant, it'll stretch.

A tomato will stretch. I think that's the difference between some of this stuff, green snapping and some of it having the ability to bend. This is that hydronium. Here's your pH scale. Who was talking to me about battery acid? There it is. Zero. Where's hydronium? Zero. Somehow they have figured out how to take sulfuric acid and water, do whatever they do to it. It'll sit there at about zero, but I can put it on my hands. I can wipe my face. I can lick it with my tongue. No burn.

Put it on your pants, [inaudible 00:26:38] Bleach. Is bleach a killer? It's a trick question. Bleach doesn't do it. Bleach releases hypochlorous acid, HOCL. That's your killing agent. When you look at your herbicides, fungicide, insecticides, especially herbicides, know your class. Know what micronutrients they eat because part of what they're doing is they're starving that plant to death. Part of what they're doing is allowing disease to get in there and kill it.

That's how a lot of our early herbicides work. Part of them were dying from disease. So as we have developed herbicide tolerant, we have developed disease tolerant. Same time. So what's the difference in a PGR and a PGPR? Plant growth regulator. Plant growth promoting rhizobias. So Joe Clapperton told me that Bradyrhizobium is a good thing to have under my corn, not just my beans. So I do it. It didn't cost much.

A lot of discussion on humic acids. I had a guy the other day telling me that dry humics were worthless because he'd had some in water for seven years and they hadn't broke down. I said, "That's not where they work. Either they need to go back there and be introduced to some sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide to make a liquid or they need to be in the soil and let the biology start working on them, right? And so I politely tried to explain that to him and he said, "If they won't break down, they're worthless." I almost explained it to him in the way that reproduction works.

But I said, "Things have to be in the right environment to get the desired outcomes." So when we look at fulvics, fulvic is that one molecule and that whole 12, 13 molecule humic process that is water soluble. Extremely small molecule. Have you ever seen the molecular structure of fulvic? You might see somebody's guess because it's like a snowflake. No two are alike. So to know how much fulvic you have, you look at a specific set of molecular weights. I have people telling me that they got 5% fulvics, 10% fulvics, 40% dry eyes. Chemically impossible.

I have never seen a liquid fulvic that you could concentrate above about 2.7 actual percent. Now 40% is something they threw in a jug. Might be fulvic. Depending on if you got it out of mushrooms or compost or whatever, you might find that there's differences in colors. Pure fulvic is very hard to get above two seven. Humic, what does it do? Well, it grabs aflatoxins, grabs mycotoxins. Electrostatic interactions. It'll grab some of those heavy metals that we pop loose. You can take a dry humic and you can put it in some pretty harsh conditions and it will still be around 5, 6, 7, 8 years.

So when I went down to the White Sands in Southern Texas and I tried to get them boys put a hundred pounds down, they thought that was more than they'd ever spent at one time. 35 bucks. I said, "So if that's out there 5, 6, 7 years, what's that per year? Is that affordable?" So we put it on the first 40 acres of sugar cane. Took sugar cane out. Sugar cane was the highest yield, the highest sugar content they'd ever had. Put it to cotton for two years. Same kind of a story. Put it back sugar cane. They're now on year eight.

So every time I go down, Spence Pennington says, "I know you're going to tell me to buy more." I said, "Well, obviously I am. So you got 14,000 acres, you put it on two. We're not going to go back on those original acres until you tell me it quit working."

This was what I learned from NutraDrip Netafim. How many people had done their last foliar at R1 to R3? That's the size of a bean at R5. If we're going to grow more branches and more pods, then we need to have more nutrition to hit those 1,375 to the pound that we were talking about yesterday on the main stage. Because at R5, 25% built. R6, 50%. R6 and three quarters, 91%. So unless we need to be out there doing fungicide at R1, we need to either do two sets of nutrition or we need to check and see where we're at on fertility and maybe do it twice.

Because once we've set how many pods we're going to have, how many beans we're going to have in a pod, what we need to do is get them burgers as big as we can. The boys that hit the high yield on corns have 62 and three-pound test weight. The guys that hit big yields on beans, they're below 1,800 seeds per pound. They're not at 3,000 are they? So when we have used biology, when we have used some humics, when we have used... I use some ocean water. We started out with a hundred gallon ocean water. We dehydrate it to one. We take 95% of the salt down.

We've got parts of 92 micronutrients. So I start filling in some of the things I don't even know I'm short of, but I'm bringing in selenium. I'm bringing in soluble iron. I'm bringing in sulfur because we can go out there and we can deep rip and we can shatter things. And what happens the next rain? They silt back in. We've got to build organic matter. We've got to have those root channels. If we're going to have long-term aeration and aggregation, we got to get that, whatever that word is, [inaudible 00:32:46] protein.

We got to get that kind of stuff built again. One of the guys talked yesterday said, "Go over here and get some of your soil that's not disturbed. Get the good guys, brew it up, put it back out there." I've had a lot of people tell me, "If you look at your garden and you got bugs, but there's four kinds of plants out there that the bugs aren't touching," take those plants, take a few of those leaves, figure out what it is they don't like and spray it on the rest of them. Works both ways.

Go out there to the fence rows, the timbers or whatever. Find your good guys because we know they're native to that area. They've learned how to survive and thrive in that. Get some more of that introduced. Find out maybe what might be out of balance or what might be long either as a heavy metal or while we might be short on a micronutrient.

Start there. Use something that's going to add the organic matter. Chicken litter is wonderful if you can afford it. The chickens aren't by you. It's not the bargain that it was 6, 8, 10 years ago. First time I tried playing high yield and this is about economic yields, and I'm all about telling you how to raise economic yields and if we want to be stupid, let's take a few acres and be stupid. But we took 40 acres and we put six ton of chicken litter, 400 pounds of dry humics.

Stoller was in the group and they furnished ever biological they had known demand. 2014, Marshall, Missouri, we raised 362.8 bushel of dry land corn. The next year we raised 386 bushel of dry land corn on different 40s. But what we did was we sped up the breakdown of that chicken litter so fast that at the end of the year we had a gain of 68 pounds of peas, 74 pounds of K. My magnesium level started going down. My organic matter shot up almost a half percent.

Is it permanent? I don't know it. But I did get that much reading because we broke all that down in one year. If you haven't done it in the fall, yes, it's still either going to steal that much or compete for that much because it takes a certain amount to break it down. You'll pull some out of wherever. The worms will come up and help you some. The chompers, if there's anybody that is highly unionized, it's biology. If the chomper doesn't show up, nobody else is going to do it. If the phosphate solubilizer doesn't show up, the nitrogen guy isn't going to do it. Right? And when somebody can tell me who's in their jug, they have left out 300,000. My closest friends that haven't been named yet.

We haven't talked about nutritional movement. I've got time. So I'm going to hit on that. I started about five, six years ago doing what I call multi-modes of nutritional movement. What will get me inside of a plant? What will get me through a cell wall? What will get me through a root structure? Fulvic doesn't. Amino acids do that. Good fulvic, I can identify 23 amino acids. Anybody here using the soy dust in their planter box? 16 amino acids in the soy dust. They are D's, right, plant derived. They steal a little bit of energy to convert, but you have 16 there. You could have 23 out of your fulvic.

I use a product called Macro-Sorb. It's the same thing you would find in Heparin, your blood thinner. Pharmaceutical grade. We run some of that. I have run the pink salmon that they don't take any of the meat off of. They ferment that for 16 months. Again, [inaudible 00:36:32] just like your Macro-Sorb. Macro-Sorb actually comes out of pig blood. Some of it used to come out of cows. Everybody got scared of mad cows. So now it's all pigs. That's why you'll see a seven for nitrogen. The protein coming out of the blood. Essential oils will go back and forth through cell walls. They will feed one person and take somebody else down.

My third generation Cherokee medicine man, I worked with him some. When I did some animal nutrition for Organic Valley through Dr. Paul Detlef. He was big on the tinctures. They made me buy The Chemistry of Essential Oil Made Simple. 619 pages. This is a kid who reads articles, not books, but I have put together in small amounts, 13 essential oils that I call Cedar Heater. If you think about Ralco animal nutrition, their whole world is oregano. Well, the oregano and thyme, and rosemary are antivirals. Maybe they can help me in the furrow or as I go through the leaf.

I know they will help me provide some ERGs that mimics lightning till that stomata open up. We use a little bit of orange. We use a little bit of lemon. We use a little bit of cinnamon. We use a little bit of cloves. We use a little bit of cayenne, echinacea, and garlic because that'll outperform penicillin.

We're getting close. Nobody's told me to quit, but we're close. Echinacea stimulated by his natural immune system. Will it do it in the plant? Cayenne speeds up metabolism. Will it do it in the plant? Yarrow would make your blood vessel have less restriction on fluid movement. Will it do it in the plant? So I throw these things out there as a what if. Then the last one is your nanos. If I'm going to do a nano, I'm going to buy an unloaded on my side because I build, I'm going to use the technical grade one ounce per acre, not four.

And if I'm trying to kill my palmar erythema and my red-root pig weeds or my water hemp, those kinds of things, a little bit of boron seems to make some of that chemistry work a little better. So I'm going to take my herbicide,. I'm going to take my boron. I'm going to take that unloaded nano, and I'm going to put them in a bucket because that's what I want in the nano. Then I'm going to put it in the water bath. Because I don't want it filling up on AMS or high calcium water, or high iron water, or high sulfur water, then put them in. See, if we can get back to controlling some of these weeds because I don't think there's much new chemistry coming.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank Brad Forkner for his tips and suggestions on making in-season adjustments with inputs and his thorough review of cutting edge inputs and tools for crops. We also want to thank our sponsor NewFields Ag for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Brad Forkner and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.