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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an economics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by economics.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.
(00:37)
Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. Glad you’re tuning in again. We’re end of August now and it happens to be the Farm Progress Show going on this week and I happen to be at the Farm Progress Show. There’s a big crowd starting to gather here, but we have our guest that’s joined us here in the booth today. We’ve got Daniel Sell with us today. Most people may not have heard of Daniel, but anybody in the farming industry may have heard of Farmer Dan. Daniel, if you will, tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re from.
Daniel Sell (01:05):
Hey, thanks for having me on, Mike, and man, it’s fun at Farm Show. There’s a lot of people, nice to meet some people that follow me that I’ve never been able to meet before. Like you said, I’m Farmer Dan, so to speak. My name is Daniel, sell a farm in the northeast panhandle of Texas. My dad and I farm hard red winter wheat and sorghum or some might know it as Milo. We’re strictly a dry land farm, so any moisture we get is from the good Lord above and we just try to survive and be good stewards of the land.
Mike Howell (01:32):
Okay, Dan, well we are pleased to have you in the booth with us today and we want to find out a little bit more about your social media offerings. I understand that you have quite a following on social media. Tell me what that’s all about. I’m kind of old school and I really don’t do a lot of social media, but tell me what’s going on with the social media.
Daniel Sell (01:48):
So I am on probably three different platforms that I really try to work hard on. One is Instagram, that’s where you’re going to see the most, and I go as farmer Dan 97 on all platforms. I started in Instagram seven or eight years ago and thought it was a cool thing back when I was in school and never really took off on it till I’d say probably 2018. I started realizing that hey, I’ve got something here and I can make something work. And it also helped. I was good buddies still am with Cher Larson back in the day before he even had any followers or Larson farms with some people might know him as, and he and I had a good time trying to race each other to 10K. He beat me and of course now, man, he’s probably hundreds of thousands followers away from me, but I’d just like to share what it’s like to farm in the panhandle of Texas.
(02:35)
For the last three or four years we’ve been in a pretty hard drought. We just started getting into some moisture here. Again, thank the Lord, and it’s been nice to show people what we can grow versus what we have to grow during a drought. That’s what I like to do. I’m on TikTok as well. I don’t have any filter on there. I just share what I think and just have a lot of fun on that. I got about a hundred thousand followers on there. And then Twitter, man, it’s just a good place to learn things. That’s where I learned most of my stuff on ag, Twitter, so to speak, and you just get a good vibe from those older folks on Twitter versus the young kids like me on Instagram and such.
Mike Howell (03:11):
Dan, you mentioned the drought and I sure feel your pain in that area. I’m down here in south Mississippi. We haven’t had a rain in probably 45 days now, and we always talk about how hot it is, but rarely the temperature gets over a hundred. We’ll be mid-nineties, but I haven’t heard this officially, but I know we’ve had to set a record for the most consecutive days, over a hundred this year. The last I saw we were at about 14 or 15 days over a hundred degrees and it’s just unbearable. All the pastures are dried up and turned brown already. Nobody has a lot of hay and what hay they do have, they’re already having to start feeding. The ponds and the pastures are already dried up and it’s just bad in my part of the world, but I’m glad you’re out of the drought and getting some rains. How are the crops looking in your area?
Daniel Sell (03:55):
Well, we had a pretty hard wheat harvest. It wasn’t much to write home about and honestly we slapped a lot of milo into the ground when it was wet and it didn’t root down. Now when we’re having these hot days and not a whole lot of moisture during the growing season, it’s burnt up some in fact. So it’s not great, but I mean I can complain but it won’t do any good. I think we’ll have an average year if we can just catch a few rains between now and the end of fall and then just hopefully push that crop to the finish line.
Mike Howell (04:25):
Dan, you were talking about your social media and the things you do there. Tell us a little more about that. Why are you doing the social media? What’s in the social media stuff for you or what are you trying to get out of it?
Daniel Sell (04:35):
It’s a great way to meet friends. I truly believe that. I’ve met a lot of guys that are farmers, non-farmers. I’ve talked with people from Australia all the way to Germany and you just get a good sense of, hey, I’m not the only farmer in the world that does something different. It’s fun. I truly don’t really have an idea of what I’m doing on social media. I just show a day-to-day videos of what’s going on, why we’re doing this, why we use this type of equipment, and the goal was to just get followers, but I’ve now since turned into a way to actually make money off of it and that’s really pushed me forward, incentivized myself to work hard at it and have goals throughout the year just to reach follower mark or make however much. It’s a lot of fun. I enjoy it. I often think what am I going to be doing in 10 years from now with Farmer Dan and I have no clue, but we’ll just make it work, I guess.
(05:26)
And that’s kind of what I try to do. I try to just show videos of the tractors, combines, whatever else, and it’s a lot of fun because a lot of people just know of the, I-state farmers so to speak, and those boys, they work hard. I know they do. I mean, they got to put gas in the boats and go to the lake house every now and then. I’m sure that’s hard for them, but us guys down here in God’s country in Texas, man, I mean it’s just nonstop work. We only grow one summer crop. The other crop is hard red winter wheat, which is planted from late fall and we harvested that next summer, so we’re keeping care of ground a hundred percent of year. There’s never really any stops unless we get rain or snow. It’s a lot of work and people don’t realize it.
(06:08)
We do a lot of tillage if you have that perspective of just what I show you, and I’ve been outspoken about that as well and really our operation, we’re one third no-till, one third conventional till and one third is into end crops at all times. I just like showing that to social media people and just showing them that, Hey, there’s other things in corn and beans. I come off as I’m resentful to those guys. More I’m just jealous because well, who wouldn’t want to live where it rains all the time. But yeah, that’s kind of the gist of it. I hope I’ve answered your question well enough.
Mike Howell (06:41):
Yeah, it is kind of hard to think about being up in that part of the world. They don’t have to worry about getting the hard pipe set out to run the irrigation. They have the organic matter that we don’t have down here in the south. A lot of blessings they have, but it sure does get cold up there in the winter sometimes.
Daniel Cell (06:57):
Oh man. I wouldn’t stand for it.
Mike Howell (06:59):
Dan, I understand that y’all have been on the farm there for quite a few years. Tell me a little bit about the history of the farm.
Daniel Cell (07:05):
Well, I’m the fifth generation here in the Texas panhandle to farm. Hopefully my son will take on from me, but I’m not going to push him. We’ve been farming for five generations now. The home place is what my ancestors settled on years ago and prior to that I think they lived in Kansas. I bet we’ve been farmers since the dawn of time really. I mean every man has some of that inning. But yeah, we’ve been here for a long time and I hope to continue this for a long time. It’s getting tougher to grow crops it feels like, but I’m sure guys felt the same way in the seventies and eighties too. Time will pass and we’ll just keep going.
(07:42)
But yeah, my dad and mom had eight kids and I’m the only one that has fully pursued farming. The rest of them have that gene in them that they want to farm, but they’ve chosen different paths and I couldn’t be happier for them and it’s just a lot of fun to work with my dad. There’s times when it’s tough. I have a different opinion than him, which is shocking, but overall I wouldn’t want to work with anyone else or work for anyone else either.
Mike Howell (08:07):
Yeah, it’s always good to be there close to your family and miss those days a lot. Dan, you mentioned Milo as one of your main crops there. Early on in the season we started talking a lot about different crops and we hit on corn and soybeans, potatoes, canola, cotton. We talked about a lot of crops there, but Milo was not one that we talked about. So if you don’t mind, let’s talk a little bit about Milo and what it takes to grow a crop, a milo, if you would kind of talk us through it from start to finish.
Daniel Sell (08:33):
Milo is a real small seed. A lot of people don’t realize how small it is and we use sugar beet plates in our planter to actually get a good simulation off of them. They’re about the same size as the sugar beet seed for those who might need a reference. Typically, around here, we like to plant it in mid-June. A lot of guys will plant it earlier if they’re a little bit further away from us, but for our operation with the heat we get in August, it’s best to plant that late June time, that way it’s not trying to push ahead out while we’re in a hundred degree weather all August, it’s timing and everything. It really looks like a corn plant for about, I’d say eight weeks of its growing season. It’s got the same look to everything, but then it just shuts off. It don’t grow any taller than I would say waist high for most folks and then it shoots a stem out and pushes ahead, but I think there’s about three or 4,000 seeds per head.
(09:27)
We’ll see yields around here anywhere from 50 to 120 bushels an acre depending on the rain and how well you take care of your weeds, and I think the hardest thing for us for our operation is weed control because God bless them, but the corn growers have the attention of the seed guys and they want to make them happy. There’s no roundup ready milo. There is a variety out now that you have a sort of chemical resistance to that you can attack grass weeds with, which we have used the past three years and it is showing its use on the farm. But overall, your only option is to really work hard on putting that pre down before you plant because after then, I mean you can run a cultivator through it, but bottom line, if you can’t control the weeds from the beginning, you’ll never control them throughout the season.
(10:13)
Harvest usually is after hard freeze for us. There’s guys down south, real far down south that’ll actually spray their milo with Roundup when the grain’s ready and then just go and harvest it, but we don’t really have the need for that. The hard freeze will come through and kill the plant and then we’ll harvest it. Actually what we use, John Deere used to make these headers called all crop heads, I think they called, them and they made them for soybeans. They had snouts and they had discs and belts and the snouts and the whole housing of that would float on the soil. I think that was before they built drapers or had drapers back then. We used to run those for quite a while and of course John Deere discontinued them when Draper came out and it was really hard to find parts and at one point I think we were spending 15 to $20,000 every three years to put it in shape and get it going.
(11:04)
The reason that we need something with Rose versus like a draper or a wheat head or something like that is up here, we get a lot of wind and when a hard freeze comes through and then a wind comes, you can have thousands of acres just fall over or lodge just some might call it, and you’ve lost your crop. If it’s a good year, you’re talking about four to five feet worth of plant just to get to that head. So you’re taking all that into your combine and it’s hard on it. So what we use is John Deere’s corn heads. We run two 612C corn heads and we have a conversion kit. It’s called Arron Conversion, Arron conversion kit, and what they do is they remove the rollers, the deck plates, anything that goes with corn, and then they replace that head sprocket with the same sprocket, but then it’s got discs on it and you can just run through that row and cut it.
(11:56)
There’s nothing else but the chains in that sprocket with a disc and that has saved us so much time and money ’cause you can find parts with a corn head you can get done and it’s a lot lighter and man, it’s been probably the best investment we’ve had for Milo in years.
(12:11)
The hardest part for us in our operation is weed control. I mean, you can just throw buchu and money at it and sometimes you just can’t win. That’s always a challenge for me. I always look into what I want to use at the beginning of the year and then hope that we can get some rain along the way to kind of push things along after harvest. Usually we’ll just take it to the elevator around here, but there’s guys that’ll sell it to the pig farms. You can sell it to a lot of things and I think, if I can remember right, Milo is gluten-free, so it actually can be used as a health food grain as well.
(12:44)
They’ve made cereals, you can make bread, you can make a lot of stuff, and I think years ago, China used to be one of our bigger contenders for purchasing Milo back in the day. It’s got a use. It’s not something that I would grow if I got a lot of rain, but with Milo’s resilience to drought, I mean we’ve seen 30 40 bushel milo in a hard, hard drought where we maybe see one or two rains the whole season. It’s resilient and it does a great job at just growing and doing well for us. That’s why we raise it.
Mike Howell (13:15):
Okay. Dan, you mentioned the herbicides. Talk a little bit about the fertility needs for Milo. In my part of the world, we don’t grow a lot of it anymore. A few people will grow it every now and then, but it seems like everybody just puts it out there and doesn’t really manage it like they ought to make maximum yields. Talk a little bit about what you need to do fertility wise to achieve those high yields.
Daniel Sell (13:36):
Well, for my farm, I try to put at least 60 pounds of actual N on my ground if I want to see 70 80 bushel milo. It all depends on the rain. I feel like I’m a broken record saying that, but it really depends on the rain. Next year we’re looking into putting some phosphate down within the urea and I’m kind of excited about that. My ground lately has called for that and my soil samples, but I just haven’t found the need and hard thing for it is its such a long-term investment for me because that stuff, it doesn’t move. It sits there unlike nitrogen, so it’s hard to, especially if you’re just going from year to year with a piece of ground, you hate to put that kind of money into something.
(14:16)
There’s some things coming up next year that I’m really excited about trying and phosphate and it helps that Milo and it really pushes that wheat ahead too for our operation. We need that wheat stubble for the milo next year, so it’s protected from a harsh environment while it’s just beginning to grow. It’s just a three-year round deal where you just got to make a plan and hope for the best.
Mike Howell (14:37):
Well, Dan, we appreciate you going through the Milo and what it takes to make a good crop of Milo. Before we wrap things up, we started the program off mentioning that we were here at the Farm Progress Show. I hope some people are actually listening to this on their way into the show if you are tuning in and listening on your way to the show, travel Safe. But we also want to remind everybody that you can come by our booth here. It’s Nutrien Premium Fertilizers. I will be here today, Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan is going to be here in the booth with us most of the day today, so come by and visit with us. Dan, if you would tell our listeners again where they can find you on social media one more time.
Daniel Sell (15:11):
Yeah, just three platforms, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Just look up Farmer Dan 97, man, you can find me and you don’t have to follow me if you don’t like me, but hey, I like you, so let’s make it work.
Mike Howell (15:22):
There you go. Well, Dan, we sure appreciate you stopping by the booth today. I look forward to visiting with you a little more. Listeners, as you know it’s time now that we move into our next section where we talk about somebody famous in agriculture.
(15:37)
I was trying to figure out who we would talk about today. We’ve actually had our last two episodes from the Panhandle of Texas, and when I think about Texas, I think about cattle and all the western movies and the cattle drive through Texas and we just don’t have that anymore. The main reason we don’t have the cattle roaming around in the Panhandles anymore is because of Barbed wire and a man named Joseph Glidden, who was actually the man that invented the barbwire back in 1873. He began to work on this invention and finally came up with what he called the winner, which is the design that he finally started selling late in 1874. He placed the barbs along a thin wire and then used another wire to wrap around it and patented that invention. The patent was actually made November the 24th, 1874 when Glidden was 61 years old, he and a local hardware dealer, Isaac Elwood, began manufacturing and selling the Barbed wire with his patent as the barbed fence company of De Kalb, Illinois.
(16:38)
Now, Glidden got out of the manufacturing a few years later, even though he had a lot of legal challenges about the Barbed wire, he did still receive royalties on his invention. By the time of his death in 1906, he ended up being one of the richest men in America. And just a note of interest here, if anybody has ever seen the movie Back to the Future, part three, the Barbed Wire Salesman in there, a lot of people say that that was actually based on Joseph Glidden. We want to thank Mr. Glidden for all of his contributions to Barbed wire.
(17:07)
I never realized that there were actually so many different types of Barbed wire until I visited the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, and they have an exhibit in there, and there’s literally hundreds of different Barbed wire samples in there. If you’re ever in that area, I highly recommend you go by and take a look at that. Barbwire has really changed the way we think about grazing cattle and cattle production here in the United States. So listeners, one last time, I want to invite you to come by our booth. If you’re in town today, give us a visit. We’d love to hear from you. And until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
