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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt, with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38):
Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. I’m joined here today with Scott Fichtner and Jenna Overmyer. Scott and Jenna are with Nutrien Ag Solutions and they both work for a diagnostic lab in California. I’m going to let them introduce their self a little more, tell more about the lab where they are and exactly what they do there. Scott, do you mind introducing yourself?
Scott Fitchner (00:58):
Yeah, sure. I first off appreciate you for having us on here today. Again, my name is Scott Fichtner and I manage Precision Agri Labs. As you mentioned, we are a location within Nutrien Ag Solutions. We’re based in Madera, California, right in the center of the state. We’ve been part of the company for nearly 30 years now, and our primary business is testing soils, tissues and waters, and even a lot of fertilizers for our customers, a lot of growers, a lot of internal pest control advisors as well. We’ve, like I said, been doing this for about 30 years now.
Mike Howell (01:32):
Okay, that sounds great. Jenna, do you have anything you want to add to that?
Jenna Overmyer (01:36):
I’m Jenna Overmyer. I’ve worked in agriculture for around eight years, been with Nutrien for about four of those. I manage the marketing here at the lab, and I also manage our field team that goes out and pulls samples up and down the valley here in California.
Mike Howell (01:52):
So how big a team do you have working there at the lab, and how many folks do you have out in the field actually collecting these samples?
Scott Fitchner (01:58):
From the lab side, we have about 10 full-time personnel between the individuals that are doing all the diagnostic work and our tech staff.
Jenna Overmyer (02:06):
For the field team, there’s about seven of us. It’s been growing every year.
Mike Howell (02:11):
What crops are you mainly working with, out in California?
Jenna Overmyer (02:14):
The crops we’re sampling are pistachios, almonds, grapes, citrus. We also have some row crops: onions, garlic, tomatoes, cotton, corn.
Mike Howell (02:26):
Appreciate giving us that little bit of background. It really doesn’t matter what crop it is, we have these nutrients that are essential to any crop that we’re growing and they all may need little different amounts of those nutrients, but they’re all necessary for each one of these crops. So guys, before we get into it, let’s talk a little bit about tissue sampling and exactly what tissue sampling is.
Jenna Overmyer (02:45):
Tissue sampling is the collection of plant parts for analysis.
Mike Howell (02:49):
Why is it important that we collect these tissue samples? Why do we want to get the samples and have them analyzed?
Scott Fitchner (02:55):
Right now with the prices where they’re at and all the regulations that growers have to deal with, the decisions on how much and what fertilizers to use, really, it’s important, and how best to use the proper fertilizer. They can’t just kind of guess and flip a coin, “I’m going to use this one.” I need to know more about the growing conditions that I’m dealing with, the type of soils. There are a lot of factors that play into the decision of what sort of fertilizer they want to use, and the tissues really are the foundation of that. If you don’t have a good tissue sample to know where you’re deficient, where maybe you’re excessive, you’re just guessing, and that guess could, again, cost you quite a bit of money. It could also cost you your crop, if you end up putting on something that ends up being toxic to that crop because you’ve exceeded those levels that may be safe.
Mike Howell (03:38):
In one of our very first podcasts, we talked about soil sampling and the need to do soil samples, but now we’re coming back talking about tissue sampling. What can tissue sampling offer us that soil sampling may be missing?
Scott Fitchner (03:50):
The tissues really tell you what’s going on in the plant. We can know everything about the soil, how much fertilizer’s in the soil and make assumptions that we’ve got plenty of what we need, but if we don’t know what’s going on in the plant, we’re missing a pretty important piece of the whole picture. Oftentimes, we find that certain soil conditions can limit what’s taken up into the plant, and so we always want to pull our tissues and make sure that the plant has what it needs. And if it doesn’t, we can make either a foliar application or make some changes to our soils to meet those needs. It’s a critical way of knowing what’s truly happening in the plant and help identify where we need to maybe supplement with an additional application to provide those needs that the plant has at that given time.
(04:27):
A lot of our crops here in California, tree crops, the trees and vines, we actually have a lot of customers that’ll sample monthly and even sometimes weekly or biweekly, or I should say twice a month, so that they can actually make a change in-season and provide, again, those needs, and not have to wait till the following year and potentially have a loss in that given year.
Mike Howell (04:47):
Jenna, do you have anything you want to add to that?
Jenna Overmyer (04:49):
I think it’d be important to probably talk about the need to take samples and when you need to take them. You’re going to want to take samples throughout the growing season to track any sort of changes. And to evaluate problem areas, you’ll want to take a sample when that problem arises.
Mike Howell (05:06):
Using these tissue samples, if we happen to detect something with our eye, that’s one way that we use it a lot in the eastern part of the country. If we see deficiency symptoms showing up, we’ll pull samples and try to help identify what’s going on. And I understand the way y’all are using it is regular monitoring to make sure the crop isn’t maybe taking up more of a given nutrient or we’re actually losing a nutrient in the field that we thought we had there. So, several different ways we can use this technology.
(05:31):
You mentioned collecting samples. How do we go about collecting samples? What part of the plant do we want to collect? And then maybe talk a little bit about, how do we handle these samples after we collect them?
Jenna Overmyer (05:41):
With tissue sampling, it varies by crop and maturity level. When you collect tissue samples, you’ll want to follow our guidelines. We have all of our guidelines on our website, precisionagrilab.com. That’ll give you more detail on what crop you’re pulling and the timeframe you’re pulling those samples. In general, you want to make sure you’re collecting the proper plant part, you want to make sure you’re collecting the correct volume. And then when storing and shipping, you want to make sure your samples are kept cool, and you also want to store and ship them in the proper containers so they’re not damaged during shipment.
Mike Howell (06:19):
Okay. You mentioned collecting the proper plant part. Can you elaborate on that a little more? What parts of the plant do we need to be collecting?
Jenna Overmyer (06:25):
Yeah. So for instance with almonds, you’re going to want to be collecting your leaf from a non-fruiting, non-expanding spur. If you were to collect from a fruiting spur or an expanding spur, you might get results that are inaccurate. And it also changes during the season. You’re going to be picking the most recently mature leaf, so depending on the timeframe of the season, the leaf in that spur will change.
Mike Howell (06:53):
Some good information there. When we sample corn or cotton in the east, a lot of times if it’s really small plants, we may actually take the whole plant to send in, and then when they start getting larger, we’ll pick a certain leaf on each plant to send in. How big a sample do we need and from how big of an area do we need if we’re monitoring a whole field for nutrients?
Jenna Overmyer (07:12):
So if we’re doing a composite sample, you’re going to want to go in all four quadrants of the field. For almonds, we typically sample around 20 trees in each quadrant and about three leafs per tree in each quadrant.
Mike Howell (07:24):
Okay, so make sure we get a good representation of the whole area.
Jenna Overmyer (07:27):
Correct.
Mike Howell (07:28):
We also hear different types of sampling. I think basically what we’ve talked about today is leaf sampling so far, but I know there’s other types of samples. Do y’all do petiole samples as well, and if so, can you talk about the difference between a leaf sample and a petiole?
Scott Fitchner (07:42):
Depending on the crop in question, some crops, the proper method is pulling the leaf or the most recent mature leaf. Some, for example, on grapes, you want the petiole. Some people like the leaf and the petiole. So when you look at a leaf, you typically think of the actual leaf portion of it, and then kind of that stem off the leaf being the petiole. And depending on the different types of crops, on tomatoes for example, you have a complex leaf where you have your leaflets, and then the center portion is actually the petiole.
(08:09):
It really depends on what crop you’re looking at and the guidelines that are out there, typically from the university that were developed based on those specific plant parts. Again, I go back to grapes. Many of the guidelines base the interpretations on the petiole portion. We have others that like to see the leaf and the petiole as well, because there’s different ways of looking at that data to develop recommendations for that crop. In most cases, the guidelines have come from universities and those really tell us what part to collect to analyze, to provide the most accurate data.
Mike Howell (08:41):
I’m hearing more and more these days about a new type of analysis, a sap analysis. We’re not using a whole lot of that, or at least I’m not, I don’t know a whole lot about it. Is that another test that y’all can do? And if it is, tell us a little bit more about what a sap analysis is.
Scott Fitchner (08:55):
I hear quite a bit about it in the field. We do not run that test here. We do have customers who have started running a few samples. As far as I’m aware, there’s only one lab, I think, in the United States. And I could be wrong here, but there’s a lab in Michigan that is being used by some Nutrien locations. They have developed a lot of their own guidelines to interpret that. The challenge we have is there’s not a whole lot of information out there outside of these labs; I think they keep a lot of the information private.
(09:22):
At this point in time, we send customers that way if they want to do it. Handling, sampling, there’s a lot of detail to it, how you have to handle that, overnight it, keep it on ice. It’s definitely a more intensive method to collect those samples and get them in. So as of right now, it’s not something we run out here. None of the local labs we deal with or partner with do it. I think it’s starting to come. You hear a lot more discussion about it and the data it can provide, so things could be changing in the near future.
Mike Howell (09:47):
And finally, what can growers do with the results of these tests? I mean, we’re not just taking these tests to see what’s out there. How can they use the results from this to be more efficient in their cropping systems?
Scott Fitchner (09:57):
As I kind of mentioned earlier, the price of fertilizers today just continues to rise. The availability of a lot of fertilizers is also a challenge. Using tissue samples allows those growers to invest their money where it’s needed, where the crop needs it. We’re also trying to get more pounds per acre off our fields today, so they want to make sure that they get what that crop needs to be as productive as it can be.
(10:17):
We’re also, here in the west, dealing with permanent crops in many cases, our trees and vines again. So they’re not only trying to get a crop off that year, they’re also trying to keep those trees alive and productive so that, the following year, hopefully they’ll get even better yields and keep things moving along. They want to make sure all their inputs are going in where they’re needed to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
Mike Howell (10:36):
I really appreciate y’all joining me today and walking through the process and the reasoning for doing tissue sampling. I know we’ve covered a lot of information. Is there anything that either one of you think that we may have left out, some other pertinent information we need to talk about today?
Jenna Overmyer (10:50):
I wanted to say thanks for having us. If anyone has any questions or they just want some more information, please have them contact us, visit our website. We have a lot of videos that we’ve done. You can find us on YouTube as well, and we go over how to sample different crops in our videos. And then, we also have our guidelines posted as well.
Mike Howell (11:10):
That sounds great. And I want to put a plug in for our eKonomics website as well, that’s www.nutrien-eKonomics.com. And we have a webinar that we did a couple of years ago with Mississippi State University. It goes through different crops and how we sample these different crops. So if you need more information on tissue sampling, we’ve just given you several good places you can go and get more information on that.
(11:38):
Okay, listeners, we started a new segment last week talking about tailgating at the high school football games. We talked about our boiled peanuts and getting ready for that.
(11:46):
Coming up, this week is the first week of the football season. Poplarville High School is going to be playing the intra-county rival, Picayune. Now, Picayune has won the last five or six in a row, and Picayune is the larger of the two schools. They’ve kind of had Poplarville’s number here the last few years. We think this may be the year that Poplarville can come in and get back on a winning streak against them. We’ll let you know how that turned out next week.
(12:08):
This week, we’ve got to feed all these kids, we’ve got to make sure we have something to eat before we go to ballgame and have a little fun. We’re going to have the grills out this week and we’re going to start the tailgate season off simple. The menu this week is going to be hamburgers, we’re going to do some potato salad, we’re going to have some baked beans. That’s pretty much going to be the menu. Dessert, we always want to try to throw something sweet in there. We’re right at the end of watermelon season here in the south. We got a few watermelons that I’ve had in the cooler for a few days, and we’re going to get those watermelons out and cut those right before the ballgame.
(12:38):
The food that we want to focus on this week is the hamburger. Now, a lot of people are saying, “Anybody can cook a hamburger. What’s so special about cooking a hamburger, and why in the world do you want to talk about a hamburger?” But I think I’ve got some information here about hamburgers that we want to pass along, and maybe it’ll open some people’s eyes.
(12:55):
I was looking at some statistics just the other day, and on average, an American will consume two and a half hamburgers per day. Now, if you average that out, that’s over 50 billion hamburgers per year that are consumed by the American population. Well, that’s a lot of hamburgers. But then you start thinking, what actually goes into a hamburger? We have to have a farmer out there that’s raising cows. He’s going to have a cow calf operation and producing calves, and that farmer could raise that calf up to market weight on his own. But most of the time, he’s going to wean those calves and sell those off.
(13:26):
They’ll go somewhere and get fed out on grass for a few months until they get up to a certain weight, and then they’re going to ship those off to the stockyard, feed them on grain. Once they get to the stockyard, they’ll stay on grain for probably about 60 days. During that 60 days, they’re going to eat a lot of corn and other grains during that time. We have to have farmers that are supplying those grains as well.
(13:46):
From there, they’re going to go to the processing facilities. At the processing facilities, that’s when they’re going to be slaughtered, they’re going to be cut up into different cuts, and we’re going to get the hamburger ground out of them at that time. They’ll have to be processed, they’ll have to be packaged. Then they have to be shipped to your local grocery store. You have to have people at the grocery store that’ll handle that meat when it comes in and get it put out on the counter. As you can see, there’s a lot that actually goes into the production of a hamburger. It’s just not going to the grocery store and picking up that hamburger patty.
(14:14):
For this week’s tailgate, we’re not just doing any kind of hamburger, we’re going to do some special burgers tonight. I’ve bought about 60 pounds of hamburger meat. We’re going to mix some Lipton Onion Soup Mix in that hamburger meat, let it sit for about 24 hours so it can take in all the flavor of that soup mix and get an onion flavor in there. Before we make these patties out, I’ve got some Velveeta cheese, a two-pound block of Velveeta cheese, and we’re going to slice that into thin slices and leave it in that about two-inch square that the block comes in.
(14:43):
And then I’m going to form my hamburger patties around that Velveeta cheese. So instead of having cheese on top of the burgers, we’re actually going to have the cheese in the middle of the burger. We’re going to form these hamburger patties, and we’ll do all this at home before we go to the tailgate, just to take out some of the steps we have to do outside, it’s still pretty hot out here. But we’ll form all these patties and have them wrapped up and ready to go in the cooler.
(15:05):
And we’re going to take these and we’re going to put them on the grill. We’ll put a little salt and pepper on them and put a little Tony’s seasoning on top of them, just to give them a little more flavor. And we’re going to cook these burgers on a gas grill here at the ballgame, let everybody smell these burgers cooking. When we get through, we’re going to feed everybody right there at the trailer, but Heath and all his buddies, they’re going to be playing the game and they can’t make it pre-game to eat all the hamburgers, and they don’t want to be left out. So we’re going to have to cook enough to make sure we have some leftovers for them.
(15:31):
What I’m going to do is, when I get these burgers ready, I’ve got some big aluminum pans. I’m going to put a little bit of Worcestershire sauce in those pans and some water. Put those burgers in that Worcestershire sauce and water mixture and then put them back in the cooler. We’ll let them sit there during the ballgame. And then when the game’s over, we’ll fire that grill back up and get those burgers out, get them hot. By the time the players get through getting their clothes changed and ready to eat, we’ll have hot, fresh burgers ready for them again.
(15:58):
Hope you’ve enjoyed this segment. We’ll try to bring you some more of these every week and talk about a different ag commodity each week. We’ll try to give you a different recipe each week, and maybe it’s something you find interesting you may want to try on your own. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
