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[00:00:00] Mike Howell: 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 use, and issues helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to the Dirt. Glad you’re tuning in this week. If you’ve been following with us for very long, you know, we’ve been taking a tour of Canadian agriculture. We’ve been talking about primarily the western part of Canada, talking about how things are a little different there.
Today we’re gonna move south down into California and Arizona, talk about agriculture in the southwestern part of the United States. To help us do that, we’ve got two agronomists on the line with us today. The first is Richard Mead. Richard, if you will, take just a minute and introduce yourself to our listeners.
I think this is the first time you’ve been on the program with us.
[00:01:11] Richard Mead: Thanks, Mike. Richard Mead’s, the name and I’ve been with Loveland and Nutrien for, geez, 28 years. Before that I was a USDA scientist for about 15 years, so getting along in the tooth there. But I am basically a regional agronomy manager for the west.
My basic footprint is California. It’s all going on here, so that’s why I’m here. I don’t go too far north or or south in Karl’s area, and I also manage the Selma Innovation Farm, which we’ll be talking about.
[00:01:39] Mike Howell: Okay, our next guest is No Stranger to the Dirt. I don’t think we’ve had him on this year, but he’s been on multiple times in the past.
Karl Wyant, it’s the Director of Agronomy with Nutrient. Karl, welcome back to the Dirt and remind everybody who you are and what you do.
[00:01:52] Dr. Karl Wyant: Hey Mike. Thanks for having me. I’m the director of agronomy at Nutrien and I’m on the mining and manufacturing side of all of our fertilizers that we produce and send around the world.
And I think more uniquely, I was trained as a desert agronomist. So I live here in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and I started out, my first territory was Phoenix to San Diego, and then it’s grown ever since. So, uh, really fantastic territory to cut your teeth in on the agronomy side.
[00:02:19] Mike Howell: Richard, if you would tell our listeners a little bit more about your role with Nutrien and what you do.
Tell us about the regional agronomy manager role, how many people are on your team, and what crops you specialize in, things like that.
[00:02:31] Richard Mead: Okay. I’m one of several, what they call Rams, regional agronomy managers. We have one in the south. His name is Peter Hill, and we’re recruiting for some regional agronomy managers in the corn belt in the east region.
I have kind of a unique role where I’m also a manager of one of our innovation farms. There’s four innovation farms in the country. The some innovation farm that I manage is basically the only one on the west. The other three are in Champaign, Illinois, Owensboro, Kentucky, and Winterville, Mississippi. And they’re there just to showcase our technology, be it dyna, grow seed or love products, and actually test things in a real world environment and to showcase our products.
[00:03:09] Mike Howell: Richard, I’ve never had the opportunity to get out and visit the innovation farm that you’re managing there. I’ve been to the other innovation farms and they are quite impressive, but we’ll talk a little bit more about your innovation farm here in a few minutes. Karl. We spend a lot of time talking about corn and soybeans here in the eastern part of the United States.
We’ve got some other, what we term row crops, cotton and rice and things like that. When we move over into California and Arizona agriculture, things get a lot broader. We’ve got a lot more crops to deal with. Talk a little bit about some of the diversity and. The other important crops that are grown in this region?
[00:03:42] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah, Mike, that’s a great question. So folks might think California, Arizona, can they farm in the desert? Can they farm in some of these A or semi AED areas? And the answer is, we can. And we farm really high yields, very high quality across hundreds of different crop categories. We’ve got a lot of great sunshine, great soil, great people.
And we can make it work. It just looks a little different from what folks might be used to in Iowa or Western Canada. It’s really just a different way of seeing things and growing things. But we do have row crops. Lots of corn is grown here, especially for silage. For dairies. Same with alfalfa. If you want to come walk some really fantastic alfalfa.
Come out west, we do high yields, high quality. Sometimes I wish I were a cow when I’m in some of those alfalfa fields ’cause it looks so amazing to eat. But then you jump over to foods that we eat and I think that’s what we specialize in out west. It’s the food that we consume direct to market, like fresh chili peppers, fresh citrus.
We do a lot of fresh leafy greens. Things like romaine lettuce. Vintage iceberg, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, all the crops that your kids don’t want to eat at dinner. We grow them very well, and then we have fun stuff, wine, grapes, table grapes, and even cotton. We still do cotton out west and do that quite well.
Really, if you think of a crop just in your head, there’s probably somebody growing it, and it might be small in acreage, but most farmers figure out a way to market their crop and get it into people’s hands.
[00:05:05] Mike Howell: Karl, you know, we grow a lot of wheat on the eastern half of the United States and I’ve spent a good bit of time in the California, Arizona area back, oh, probably 10 or 12 years ago now.
Was out there quite a bit, but haven’t been out there quite as much here lately. But did get to come out to Phoenix in that area for a couple of meetings over the last couple of years. I couldn’t get over how much wheat I saw going through the Phoenix area there. Is wheat beginning to be more popular of a crop out there or has it always been there and I just didn’t realize it.
[00:05:32] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah, wheat’s been a big deal in the desert. And then moving into Southeast California, the Imperial Valley, the Coachella Valley, and Palo Verde Valleys primarily. It’s not wheat for bread or for flowers. A lot of it is wheat for pasta. So it’s Durham Wheat. And we have our own special sort of appellation of wheat.
We call it Desert Durham. Desert Durham. Farmers all claim they make the best wheat for pasta in the entire world. I like to believe them. So if you’ve had a plate of spaghetti lately, the wheat might have come from Arizona or Southeast California.
[00:06:04] Mike Howell: Okay. Learn something new every day. I’m gonna throw this next question out and give both of you a chance to answer this one.
I’m used to the southeast production system here. I know about our climate and our agriculture, but things are a lot different in California and Arizona when we look at the environment that y’all are growing crops in. Talk a little bit about how crop production differs in California and Arizona. What makes things more challenging?
Some things that are unique, how you overcome some of these challenges. Richard, you wanna start off on that one?
[00:06:32] Richard Mead: I’d say one word that’s irrigation. Without water, we couldn’t grow all the crops The coral mentioned with irrigation comes a lot of challenges. A lot of civilizations have died out because they didn’t control the irrigation issues like salinity and drainage.
But irrigated agriculture is more efficient, more productive factor or think threefold. If you took all the irrigation out of the world, you’d have to grow as many acres as the biggest Argentina for rain fed. So that’s how efficient irrigated land is. But we do have our issues. We have our issues with salinity, like I mentioned, drought areas.
Things become challenging because the water quality we get from the wells might go sour. In certain spots, like California, we have a nitrogen issue because we have too much nitrogen in the water because of numerous years of over fertilization and not good management. And now we’ve got an issue where, geez, we gotta dial back our nitrogen because we have too much of it.
That comes with the nitrogen early irrigation cycle.
[00:07:27] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah. I’d say the biggest challenge, and I always tell people it’s high value crops with high management, and so we’re managing all of our inputs, and we can do that because we have such low rainfall or very seasonal rainfall. You might get all your rain in the wintertime.
And then not be able to use rainfall during the actual growing season. And this is different from say like Iowa, where you can grow with timely rains all through the summer. So we manage everything. We manage our irrigation. When we need the water, we can dial up the right program using sensors and technology and know how to get that irrigation need met.
We have long growing seasons. We start planting corn as early as early February, and hopefully you’re out of the field by July 4th, unless you want it to be a little too spicy when you’re chopping silage. And then we’re just about to turn around here in the southern part of the territory, and we’re planting broccoli and lettuce.
It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit out right now down here, but. We’re planting cool season vegetables. That is a piece that’s interesting is that every month that goes by there’s something being grown and that makes it quite the learning experience as an agronomist because you get to have multiple reps in a year.
You have multiple seasons, you work through, you’ll have your warm season, you’ll have your cool season. You’ll have your main sort of Super Bowl event like when the almonds get fertilized, that’s probably a super bowl of Western agronomy. And then you move into some of your smaller crops and every day there’s some sort of challenge and there’s no shortage of issues going on, even on Christmas day or January 1st when you’re trying to watch college football. Something’s happening.
[00:08:57] Richard Mead: Yeah, there’s not much downtime. It’s literally something planted or harvested, 365, at least in California.
[00:09:04] Mike Howell: That leads me into another question I had here. We’d like to talk about crop rotation. In my part of the world, we’ll rotate corn and soybeans. We had a lot of cotton in this rotation, and cotton’s kind of fallen out in recent times.
But we know the benefits of crop rotation. We understand that some crops do better behind certain crops. We understand the benefits to the soils. We know we have certain challenges as well. We have to worry about things like herbicide, carryover. We need to make sure our fertility levels are gonna match up when we’re rotating crops, but that’s a very narrow range of crops.
Talk about how you manage some of these issues when you’re looking at, like we say here, sometimes we may be farming 13 months out of the year. We may actually plant a crop before we get the previous crop harvested. Y’all are growing three or four crops a year on the same piece of land and have to manage herbicide carryover.
You have to manage fertility for each one of those crops. Talk a little bit about some of those challenges.
[00:09:56] Richard Mead: Go ahead, Karl. I’ll have you do the row crops and I’ll do the permanent crops.
[00:10:00] Dr. Karl Wyant: The rotation is a challenge. You have to be very dialed in with. All your crop protection labels to make sure that you can actually plant after you may have made a spray, that you can actually put the next crop in.
So our folks are super well dialed in from a rotation standpoint. There gotta have the water available to grow the next crop. Richard mentioned we’re irrigated out here a hundred percent down here in the desert, so that can be quite the challenge. The rotation and having it happen multiple times in a year, it gives growers some flexibility to go into crops that are making money at the time, right?
Like it might be spinach one year, or they maybe they rotate into lettuce after they’ve just gotten done with cotton. So it really, it gives growers this kind of menu of things to do, and there’s the infrastructure to support it from a harvesting and labor standpoint. And I think it takes sitting down at the beginning of the year, mapping out where you want to go, and then making sure all those different variables are lined up.
Your proper protection program, your fertilizer program, and then of course you’ve gotta have markets for all the products you’re growing. So you’ve gotta have a good sales team on the back end as well.
[00:11:05] Richard Mead: Well, in the Central Valley, California, there’s so many permanent crops. We don’t really have crop rotation per se.
I think the only thing that dovetail is that with maybe. Cover crops that they put in for maybe water penetration or soil health, or maybe keeping the dust down. But when you’ve got an almond orchard there for 25 years, pistachio there for 80 years, there’s not much rotation going on. So you just have to worry about your pests and rotation of your strobe on your fungicide, things like that.
So you’re stuck with that crop for a long time. It’s a long haul investment.
[00:11:38] Mike Howell: Richard, you mentioned the almonds and that was one thing I wanted to talk a little bit about. When I was out there working, I guess it’s been about 12 years ago now when I was spending so much time out there, there was a lot of issues about the water and it still is a big issue.
Every time I pick up a farm press from out there, there’s. Issues around the water and how we can balance this situation with the people that live there have to have water to survive and the crops and the people that are producing crops have to have the water as well. So there has to be a balance there.
But at that time, there were a lot of almond trees that were getting pushed up just because they didn’t have the water to keep ’em going. What’s the situation with the almonds these days? Are we starting to get any of those back? What are some of the problems with the water? And talk about some of the things that have changed over the last 10 or 12 years.
[00:12:22] Richard Mead: Well, you’re right, they were pushing some almonds out. Oh, four years ago, right at the peak of the drought that we had. Almond prices are starting to come back up. I think COVID really hit us hard too. I think the last price, I was like two 50 a pound, which is not bad, but in the old days it used to be $5 a pound.
We still have 1.6 million acres of almond. So that little whatever, 20,000, 30,000 acres they pushed out, that didn’t make a dent in the big footprint of the almonds. That is our corn out here in California. That’s 1.6 million acres of almonds. Now it’s the up and coming crop as pistachios I mentioned.
It’s an 80 year crop. It’s gonna be here a long time. That’s very salt tolerant and actually it takes less water. And I think all those industries are under the gun to use less water, be more water use, efficient with the irrigation efficiency that we have, the sensors and genetics, there’s some more genetics of almonds coming down.
They actually use maybe six inches less of water than a variety that was grown 30 years ago. So we still have to use water though to grow crop. That’s the bottom.
[00:13:21] Mike Howell: Karl, any big changes you’ve seen over the last 10 or 12 years?
[00:13:24] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah, so the further south you go in California and out into Arizona, the more scarce the water is because you do go into these air environments.
Some of these growing communities get three inches of rain a year. That’s Yuma, Arizona. And so it’s, farmers are very conscientious about their water use. Uh, support. Richard’s statement about we’re using that water to the best of our ability. We can choose crops based on their water needs. We have access to new genetics and new technology that allow for increased yields with the same or less water as an input, which is a big win for us.
And I think the biggest challenge here is we’ve been at a political level reallocating and having some discussions about where our water goes because we have lots of people, we have lots of farms. We’re trying to figure out how do we balance all these different needs so that the people don’t suffer in cities or farmers don’t suffer.
There’s been some tension there. Here in Arizona we are under, depending on where you live, you might be under a water allocation shortage, and that’s gonna continue into next year, and that’s just based on snowpack and the Rockies and river levels along the Colorado River system between a number of states and Mexico.
And so we’re working our way through that. And I think it’s been a really good conversation because it’s bringing up the agronomy of water. You know, how much value am I getting from this gallon of water from a farming perspective? What technologies can I leverage to get the best use out of my water? So it could be a product that helps water move down into the soil and help that soil store more water so that less runs off to the atmosphere.
Uh, we have technologies, we have sensors. You can put sensors in the grounds and actually measure when your soil needs to be irrigated again and how much and how long, and so we’re getting more and more efficient as time goes on, as these technologies become less expensive and growers are willing to try new things around that water piece because it’s absolutely critical for us to stay in production.
[00:15:19] Mike Howell: Well, I’m gonna ask both of you to pull your crystal ball out and look down the road five or six years. We’ve just talked about some of the changes you’ve seen in the past. What do you think on the horizon, what do you think the next big change in production in this region’s going to be?
[00:15:32] Richard Mead: I think the word is efficiency, whether it be for water or nutrients, at least in California, you might get to the point where almost like we’re in Israel, I think the majority of what they grow and know what the percentage is.
Every drop of water they use on crops out there is reused water from the city. I don’t know when we’ll get to that point, but that is a source of water that we’ll have to use because city folks, obviously, and they’re all city folks in one way or the other, we need fresh water to drink and use and cook with.
So agriculture, since we consume 60, 80% of that water, we’re gonna have to get the lower quality water. That’s coming, I don’t know, five, 10 years from now. But I see technology in terms of sensors, which we can talk about what we have at Selma. I see that coming down the pike, and it’s gonna be really instrumental in survival in the future.
[00:16:19] Dr. Karl Wyant: I support that statement. I see in the next five years. The yields you get for how much water you spent to apply to get that, that yield will become some sort of reporting metric, and I think we’re going to see some really. Innovative practices come around water where a crop we thought needed absolutely had to have four to five acre feet in a year.
Some growers gonna figure out how to do it on two and a half, three acre feet a year, and I think that’s super exciting and we’ve been so laser focused on plant breeding and fertilizers and whatnot. I think the water part is due for the next big round of innovation and I can’t wait to see how we leverage these new product technologies and sensors and whatnot, and things that we’re doing that Richard’s doing at the Innovation Farm.
But I think that’s the space worth paying attention to, and I think that’s gonna be super exciting.
[00:17:04] Mike Howell: When I first started my career, it’s probably been 25 years ago or a little more, I was on a research farm in the Mississippi Delta, and that was my first experience with irrigation. We were doing mostly furry irrigation.
We would roll polypipe out and and water down the furrows. We did have a little bit of center pivot irrigation, but. When it started getting dry, we would turn the irrigation on and the center pivots would run nonstop. The polypipe would run until we watered it all the way out the end, and then we’d switch it over and run the next field.
And we never cut the motors off. We kept water running all the time. Fast forward until about five or six years ago, that farm has now been, uh, transitioned into an irrigation research farm, for lack of a better word, but. They’ve got water sensors out there. Now they’re looking at efficiency and how we can better manage this.
And y’all both talked about irrigation. Talk a little bit about the differences in irrigation techniques, how y’all are irrigating crops out there, and how this technology is changing the way that you do things in terms of irrigation.
[00:18:00] Richard Mead: Well, I think in Karl’s area I see a lot of flood irrigation.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Karl. The water’s not that expensive yet, but it’s getting there. Whereas where I am at at ground zero with Fresno County, I don’t ever see flood irrigation anymore. It’s either drip, micro sprinklers, maybe a center pivot here and there, but most everything drip and drip’s gotta be the most efficient.
The next step above that is. Subsurface trip, but I don’t see a lot of people doing that. That’s a lot of management. That’s a lot of balls in the air, so to speak. But drip is gotta be the way to go almost at all the acreage in the future, at least to California.
[00:18:34] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah, I support that statement. Desert agriculture still runs a lot of flood irrigation, and part of that is one, it’s the lowest cost irrigation system you can put in.
We use gravity as our way to move the water, and as long as gravity doesn’t run on anytime soon, we’re gonna be good. Which we’d be in the world of herd if that happened, but. One of the reasons why we love flood irrigation in the desert is that we can get a large volume of water on a field at one time, and we can push salt below the root zone with it.
So we can use it as our leaching fraction, despite not having a whole lot of extra water or rainfall coming down to use our leaching fraction. So we just use the flood as that big hydraulic head, push salts out, and we can water our crop at the same time. A couple of advantages, I think, if water scarcity keeps moving forward.
And we’re starting to talk about folks that are growing alfalfa on a couple acre feet a year. If that’s the future, I think it’s going to involve a transition into some of these more high tech irrigation systems like Subsurface Drip. I’ve seen some fields down here on Subsurface Drip, and they’re absolutely beautiful.
Dead of summer. They look fantastic because you’re getting the water that they need and you’re keeping it off the soil surface, like with flood irrigation, which can cause scalding, and basically that water just ponds on the surface turns into a magnifying glass and cooks the crop. It’s not a good thing.
I think we’ll see a transition. It’s just how fast is it? My crystal ball is not that sharp. It tell me a rain of change because it’s been fairly slow for the last couple decades.
[00:19:57] Richard Mead: Just to get an idea, Karl, about the drip irrigation and buried drip. When I was with the USDA, we did a buried drip experiment on alfalfa in Brawley, which is close to Yuma, and we got 10 cuttings off of that, and we only used 80% of the water that was normally used.
So there shows you the potential there. If you do it right, you know what you’re doing. Of course, that was a research plot, maybe 10 acres big, but. 10 cuttings in alfalfa. That’s pretty good.
[00:20:21] Dr. Karl Wyant: Yeah, good point.
[00:20:22] Mike Howell: A lot of potential there. We just need to capitalize on it. Richard, back at the beginning, you talked about the innovation farm there at Selma.
I told you we wanted to get back to that, and I saw on LinkedIn a few weeks ago that y’all have a big field day coming up, and I wanted to give you a few minutes to talk about the innovation farm. Tell us a little bit about. What the purpose of the innovation farm is. You mentioned that Nutrien has four of these farms.
Why is it these farms so important to Nutrien and the success that they’re having, and what kind of crops are you growing there? What can growers expect to see if they come to the field day? Who’s invited to the field day? Give us all the low down on the innovation farms around the country and the one there at Selma.
[00:20:59] Richard Mead: First of all, I invite everybody to come October 8th to Selma Field Day. It’s our fourth annual event, and it’s only like half a day. But the field innovation Farm is for, like I said earlier, real world farming to put some of our products in a real world setting. And we basically have three orchards there, 24 acres of almonds, six acres of Mandarin citrus, and six acres of grapefruit and everything as an A, b, and C treatment protocol where A is like the Cadillac.
Lexus, the Mercedes, your fancy car of choice B is like kind of middle of the road of that choice. And then C is always gonna be the commodity or grower standard, what people normally been using for years. And so we’re trying to have this stair stepping effect of yield quality to show this. Some of our products actually boost yielding quality and what we’re finding out in Selma, at least with all the sensors we have.
And I will admit that’s probably the most censored core acre innovation farm in the world. We’ve got several types of sensors I can bore you about, but basically I categorize them as a heat pulse sensor of trees. It measures exactly how much water a tree is using per day, and I extrapolate that to per acre.
This by a company called Rescope. There’s another one that measures the Dendro or the shrinks s well of the tree trunk, and that talks to a so sensor that’s FinTech. They’re also from Israel. We’re also measuring some sensors that not even on the market yet by Aqua Spy that measures nitrate. Real world nitrate.
I mentioned nitrate earlier, so I have all these sensors in the field from a data geek point of view, from me. All this information’s coming on an hourly basis, so I’ve got a lot of information to discern and we are telling the story about our products are doing physiologically in the tree. Or in the soil or a combinations thereof.
[00:22:43] Mike Howell: Sounds like a lot of exciting stuff going on there. Wanna remind everybody of those dates again, Richard? One more time. What were those dates?
[00:22:49] Richard Mead: October 8th. October 8th in Selma. And they hear this, just email me and I can send them a flyer for, there’s a little QR code and on how we do that in a podcast.
[00:22:58] Mike Howell: Yeah, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. If you’re interested in that, go to our show notes and we’ll have a link to that website there. And there’s a free lunch, so that should entice you. Oh, you’re probably gonna have to buy double the lunch now, Richard. So that’s okay. Well guys, I really appreciate y’all jumping on and talking about agriculture in Arizona and California.
Do you have any closing comments before we sign off? Anything you wanna leave our listeners with?
[00:23:20] Richard Mead: No, I appreciate you setting this up, Mike, and I think one of these days maybe we will have a live. Broadcast from the farm and Karl and I would be there seeing the event. That would be great. Look forward to it.
[00:23:31] Dr. Karl Wyant: Mike, I would close just saying if you’re interested in where the food you eat comes from, this is a great start. Looking at these regions of the United States that specialize in specialty crops and it’s the almonds and pistachios and wine grapes and lettuces of the world and everything in between.
There’s not very many climates that can do what we do, and we know that what we have is super special. So a great place to start. If. If you’re interested in that farm to fork movement, California, Arizona. We live it every day.
[00:23:59] Mike Howell: Well, gentlemen, once again, thanks for taking time to be with us today. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in this week.
If you will, hang around for just a couple of moments and we’ll be right back with segment two. Farming Isn’t Farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers at ekonomics. An entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien-ekonomics.com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature.
Listeners, welcome back for segment two where we ask an agronomist a question of the week. Today we’re pleased to have Lyle Cowell back with US Law is our senior agronomist working the Canadian Region Lyle. Welcome back to the Dirt.
[00:24:45] Lyle Cowell: Thanks a bunch again, Mike, for having me. Always appreciate being part of your podcast.
[00:24:49] Mike Howell: Lyle. Today’s question has to do with phosphate. The question is, are there any differences in dry and liquid phosphate fertilizers and is one more effective than the other?
[00:24:59] Lyle Cowell: That’s a tough question. In some ways, there’s certainly differences between dry and liquid or solution fertilizer, depending on what region you’re working in, what we call them, and there are different.
Dry fertilizers, dry phosphorous fertilizers, and they’re different liquid phosphorous fertilizers. So there are differences, but one key thing that we have to remember that once those fertilizers are in the soil, phosphates are very, very reactive. And within days, depending on the soil type, they might form calcium phosphates or magnesium phosphates, aluminum phosphates, a wide range of phosphates that might form in the soil so that all those differences within the types of phosphorus fertilizer.
After a relatively short period of time, the form that we apply becomes moot because the reaction in the soils transform the phosphates into whatever phosphates might form in that specific soil, depending on the cations that will react with those phosphates. So when it comes down to it each. Phosphorus fertilizer has a role or a role within a region, and it comes down to the farm, I think, how you want to manage phosphorus fertilizer.
Some farmers are best capable of applying dry phosphorus fertilizer, and they can do so efficiently and apply it where they want. Other farmers find that liquid fertilizer is more efficient for their operation, but it comes down to the equipment, the crop that they’re growing. Then the management system that they’re using.
Really when it comes down to it, the farmer probably needs to focus on the logistics in terms of storing and applying the phosphorus fertilizer on their operation and choose what works best for themselves on that basis. When we consider that in the end the phosphorus fertilizer we apply becomes part of the soil system, and that’s a big part of in the end of how the crop will utilize that phosphorus that we’ve bought and applied to the soil.
[00:26:46] Mike Howell: All great information on phosphorus fertilizer. We really appreciate you taking time to visit with us today. Listeners, once again, thanks for tuning in this week. We really hope you’re enjoying these episodes. If you are, please take a moment and give us a rating. Let us know how we’re doing. If you need more information on anything we’ve talked about today, you can always visit our website.
That’s Nutrien-ekonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with the dirt. Hey guys. If you like what you heard today, do us a favor and share this podcast with someone else. It could be your neighbor, your friend, your crop advisor, or whoever you think would enjoy it. Your support helps ensure future episodes, so please like, subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you’re listening from.
