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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 nutrien-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.
(00:39):
Welcome back everyone. We’re now starting season two of The Dirt. We took a little break during the holidays. There were a lot of meetings going on. I’ve been to a lot of trade shows. Got to visit with a lot of our listeners over the process of that. We enjoyed our break, but I’m glad we’re back and getting new and exciting episodes out for everybody. Our first guest on the season two is going to be Dr. Brian Arnall. Now, Dr. Arnall joined us last year and did one podcast with us and I bumped into him at a meeting at Mississippi State back in December and Dr. Arnall gave some great information during that meeting. I said that would make a great podcast. I want you to say the exact same things you did there at the podcast. Dr. Arnall, we’re glad to have you back with us and if you would take just a second and remind our listeners exactly what you do, where you are.
Brian Arnall (01:25):
Yeah, I appreciate that, Mike. Excited to be back. I’m with Oklahoma State University. My title’s Precision Nutrient Management Extension Specialist, so I hold a three-way appointment in the land-grant system and that means I get to do all three jobs. So I’m extension specialist. I teach two classes. I teach soil fertility and precision AG, both senior graduate student level courses and then I have a 15% research appointment, so I still get to do some research, but most of my research is trying to feed into my extension programme and some kind of outward looking stuff too.
Mike Howell (02:00):
We really appreciate the work you’re doing there at Oklahoma State. I’ve had the opportunity to come to Oklahoma numerous times. The first time I was out there I was a young [inaudible 00:02:10], probably 15 years old and got to come to the National Land Judging Contest and had no idea what I was doing and I had a good time, but a couple of years later I got to coach a land judging team and then several years after that had the opportunity to come back about seven years in a row for that event and really had a good time and I always remember the red dirt. Oklahoma holds a special place in my heart. A lot of fond memories.
Brian Arnall (02:35):
Land judge is what got me into my programme. That’s what got me into agronomy and everything else because I didn’t grow up on a farm and so I wasn’t a good livestock judger, but I was able to mow my way through land judging and I was about like you, I was about 15 or 16 when I went to my first national, or my only national contest and kind of got stuck on the [inaudible 00:02:55] ever since.
Mike Howell (02:55):
I was the same way. I did grow up on a farm and had a lot of livestock experience and learned that I didn’t want to be out in the pastures when it’s freezing. Working with those livestock. That’s what led me to get into agronomy, was the land judge and just like you said, but we mentioned the Red Soils in Oklahoma and that reminds me of your podcast if you would tell our listeners a little bit about your podcast and how they can tune into that one.
Brian Arnall (03:18):
About a year ago, in fact, we started our second season in January too. About a year ago we had some folks stop by. My office is kind of a community location. I had to kick out three people so that we could do this podcast this morning. Somebody had stopped by some day in the hallway and said, you know, you guys ought to really record what you talk about because it’s weird and fascinating all together. There’s three of us. It’s myself, the Soil Fertility, Josh Lofton who’s our cropping system specialist, and Jason Warren who’s our soil and water [inaudible 00:03:48] who meet and do a podcast and our fourth person is Dave Deacon and it’s a really great combo because we have me, Jason and Josh who’s been working together for over a decade. All Oakies by birth, been out and around and Dave, who’s kind of our mediator, keeps us in track.
(04:06):
He did our sunup programme. We have a little TV show on OETA or PBS every Sunday morning and Dave was basically our TV guy for 10 years, so he had a great relationship with us and so our podcast, we bring in special guests where there’s agronomy, natural resources, we’ve had Fire Ecology, just basically a bunch of different people and we just talk and learned. One of the recent shows that was really popular was our wheat breeder, Brett Carver, and he came in prepared to talk all of his wheat varieties and do his show on wheat varieties. We didn’t let him do it. We wanted to learn the history. He’d been breeding wheat for 30 years and we really wanted to dig into the changes and the challenges and so that’s kind of what we do. We talk a little bit about the current crop conditions and then just get into topics and just go whatever direction we want to.
Mike Howell (04:56):
Tell us the name of your program and how to find it.
Brian Arnall (04:59):
Red Dirt agronomy and so you can go reddirtagronomy.com or Red Dirt agronomy and most of the ways you get podcast.
Mike Howell (05:07):
Sounds great. I encourage our listeners to jump over and have a listen to your podcast as well. A lot of great information on there. Dr. Arnall, I bumped into you in Starkville and you were doing the row crop short course there this year and ended up talking about bio-stimulants, and that’s the term that’s really gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. If you would start us off and just tell us what do we mean by bio-stimulants?
Brian Arnall (05:31):
Well, when it comes to bio-stimulants, there’s a wide range of what we’re looking at. I zoom it down into different regions. You have the biologicals, the living biologicals, which is a lot of stuff I talk about. So that is your fungi, bacteria, different aspects of living organisms that you’re putting into the soil system to achieve one function. There’s lots of functions that we can talk about here in a little bit that you achieve and then you also have the stimulants. You have those things you might be placing in the soil that is stimulating biological activity. That would be the application of sugar or application of some of the organic acids.
(06:10):
You can look at it in different realms and one of the challenges right now is that we have so many of these products on the marketplace and you kind of need to dig in and understand the functionality and the mechanisms that each are proposing because there’s really a wide variance on what is out there, whether they’re creating nitrogen or whether they’re releasing phosphorus or whether they’re creating a microbial community bloom and all those things will react differently and have different outcomes.
Mike Howell (06:43):
One thing I’m picking up on and go into a lot of these trade shows, a lot of emphasis in the last, I’ll say 18 months has been on nitrogen products. That goes hand in hand with the high prices of nitrogen fertiliser we’ve seen, but seems like a lot of people are exploring these and everybody asked me about them and I have tried to do some research and figure out what works and what doesn’t. And to be honest, I have found very little if any university based research data on these. What can you tell us about those?
Brian Arnall (07:13):
This is one of the big ticket items. This is the nitrogen fixers and so I’ll even put it this way, there are two types of these microbials or two functions of these microbials that will provide nitrogen. So you have the nitrogen fixers, then you have the organic matter decomposer, so they’re basically breaking down, they’re mineralizing organic matter which will release nitrogen. You have the two functions, you’re bringing in atmospheric nitrogen and turning it into plant nitrogen or you’re breaking down organic matter.
Mike Howell (07:45):
Let’s stop just a minute and talk about those a little bit. We all know about lagoon crops and soybeans, alfalfa, so that’s the same type process as one of those you’re talking about and the other is breaking down organic matter. Now, naturally I would assume you have to have organic matter in order to break down that organic matter and get nitrogen. So logic tells me if you’re down here on the Gulf Coast where I am, we have a half a percent organic matter, we’re probably not going to get a lot of nitrogen out of something like that.
Brian Arnall (08:12):
Yeah, Mike, we have the same problem in Oklahoma. Our organic matters run from half to 2% depending on where you’re at, and that’s one of the things that I challenge with those products is that okay, if I’m in the black soils up in Northern US, if I’m in the corn belt and I’m running a 4% to 8% organic matter, I’ve got organic matter to spare. When you start dropping down into the south, we’re really trying our best to create organic matter and not break it down. That’s where we get into these things to me, and we don’t know the answer, at least academically, I’m believing, I don’t know, but I’m believing that we’re going to have regionally specific functions that I don’t want to bring in an organic matter decomposer into my soil, although folks are doing it here and they love it because they get a big flush of nutrients, but you also see a crash in your organic matter, so you have a trade off there that you’re going to have to balance.
Mike Howell (09:06):
Right and a lot of times we may see some green-up initially and just because you get an initial green-up from something doesn’t mean that’s going to translate into yield. So I want to caution everybody and not everybody just jump hole hog into something like this, but I didn’t mean to cut you off halfway through your thought there, but I thought those were two really good important points that we needed to drive in on a little more.
Brian Arnall (09:28):
Absolutely. So there’s a lot of groups. In fact, last year I had projects with the Sorghum Checkoff and Cotton Incorporated. I’m going to continue the Sorghum checkoff and by all indication Cotton Incorporated is going to turn my project into a multi-state project. We’re looking at repeating the study that I did basically from Arizona to South Carolina, which I think is critical in understanding the placement of these biological products. In my term, before we get much into it, is that we have a living organism being put into an environment and some of these are regionally specific or not, and so they have to compete with the native biome. They have to be able to compete within the soil environment. And Mike, where you’re at, it’s not quite Illinois soil. It’s not quite Iowa soil.
Mike Howell (10:19):
Not at all.
Brian Arnall (10:20):
Oklahoma, you mentioned our red dirt. We have soil that is red because it’s oxidised and low organic matter means it’s rusty. I mean that’s why it’s red. It has that rust colour, and so how do the microbes work from Arizona, Oklahoma, south Texas, the black soils going into Georgia and looping up that east coast?
(10:41):
I think they’re going to respond differently. I don’t know, but I tend to think the biology, the plants grow differently, right? Our cotton crop looks different whether you’re in West Texas or Georgia. Those two cotton plants don’t even look the same at times, even if they’re the same cultivar, and so kind of thinking we might have some differences in how the biome reacts when we put something in it.
Mike Howell (11:04):
Another thing you mentioned are these are living organisms or a lot of them are living organisms, and that goes back to my peanut days at Mississippi State. We did a lot of work with inoculants and when we first started growing peanuts, we got a lot of inoculation failures and did some research on that. There’s a lot of things you have to consider with these living organisms. If we’re using community water and have chlorine in that community water, that chlorine is there to get rid of a lot of these microorganisms. So that’s one thing we learned that we have to watch. We can’t use community water. Another thing is we can’t put this stuff in the back of the truck and let it sit out in the sun all day. You’re going to fry whatever’s living in that jug and you’ll have a bunch of dead bugs quotes there to have to deal with. Are we way off base on that or is it the same type stuff as we deal with inoculants?
Brian Arnall (11:51):
No, I would treat it just like inoculant right? Some of the products and there’s lots, so Mike, I’ve dealt with at least 20 or 30 of these. There’s a wide range, but some of them want to be used within 48 hours of opening the jug. Some say that the jug could be opened and left on a shelf as long as it’s not hot, but I would treat it like an inoculant, especially if you’re paying for it. You don’t want it out in an environment that you’re paying for, and so no, most of these that I’m talking about right now are living organisms, and so they need to be treated just like an inoculant in my opinion, and you got to be careful, some of the testing I’m doing, they put restrictions on what seed treatments I can have in furrow or on that seed when I’m doing in furrow treatment because we may have some interaction on seed treat if you think about what you’re putting on seed treat, fungicide, insecticide, and so we’ve got to be cautious about some of the combinations of seed treat and these biological treatments.
Mike Howell (12:47):
That’s exactly right. There’s so many of these and so many different seed treatments. It’s hard to test all possible combinations. If somebody’s going to do that, I’d strongly suggest you try a little bit and see how it works before you put the whole farm in it. You mentioned that you have several research projects. Can you share any of the data with us that you’ve been able to collect over the last few years?
Brian Arnall (13:06):
Yeah. When it comes to the data we had, I’m bringing up my stuff right now so I can remember the exact number. In sorghum, Sorghum checkoff, supported me looking at 16 different products across four locations, but that was in 2022, and that was a disaster of a sorghum crop for the state of Oklahoma. In fact, we bailed or swathed most of our beans, most of our sorghum, most of our corn got rolled up and never made it to final, so not a whole lot out of there. What I look at is I put the products at a low rate of nitrogen on sorghum. I’m going for 120, 150 bushels sorghum. I actually put everything at about 60 pounds of nitrogen, so 60 pounds of nitrogen plus let’s say at Corteva, Utrisha or Pivot Bio, and I have all these at 60 pounds and then I have a curve, so I have a treatment of 60 by itself, 80 by itself and a hundred, so I can tie each product back to a point on that curve.
(14:05):
Well, the problem with last year and the wonderful drought that we had is I had no curve. 60 was the same as 80, which was the same as a hundred pounds of nitrogen. There was really no response. Cotton, I had two locations with cotton and 10 products and a lot better yield, so the sorghum was rough yield. I didn’t get any over 60 bushel. My cotton, I was up into the five bell range and three bell range in my two locations. Problem was I still didn’t have an end response. It was just the year that we had, the residual was high from the previous, and so no good end response.
(14:41):
We did have one or two products that looked to be higher but not high enough to be statistical. When I’m looking at a single site year or just a single year, I don’t want to talk about trans. Let me do it again. If I see the same product show up high, even if it’s not statistical, then that means something forward. So we’ll definitely have that product in the multi-state Cotton Incorporated project.
Mike Howell (15:06):
We’ll have to come back and find out what that all shows us here when you get some more data in, and I’m glad you’re talking about trends and statistics, and that’s another topic for another day. We’re going to try to have some elementary statistics podcast.
Brian Arnall (15:19):
That’d be good.
Mike Howell (15:19):
And educate people on what the numbers mean on statistics and how those are separated out.
Brian Arnall (15:24):
Mike, I wanted to touch a little bit about using these because we’re going to have folks wanting to run these this year even without data from academics and that. I’ve got some ideas about the stuff you got to think about. That’s one of the things I talked about, the row crop, right? If we’re going to use these products, how do we make an ROI out of spending that money? Right now, on the nitrogen products, Mike, the whatever companies that are creating nitrogen, there’s three or four of them that pop off from the top of my head. They say we can replace 40 pounds of nitrogen or 25 pounds of nitrogen.
Mike Howell (15:56):
I hear that every day.
Brian Arnall (15:57):
Typically the numbers, right? I don’t know why everybody’s at the same level. I kind of do. I don’t have data, so I can’t say it out loud, but I kind of know why they’re at those numbers. But the deal is if I’m a farmer and I got to get an ROI, meaning that I’ve paid for this, I need a response, well, I’ve got to drop my rate. When you use a product like a nitrifying bacteria that creates nitrogen, 25, 40 or whatever pounds it is, you need to be applying 25 to 45 pound, 40 pounds less than what the crop needs. So let’s say you’re growing cotton and you’re three bell in country, that’s 120 to 150 pounds of nitrogen. You need to cut that back and get the product, and so we’re just seeing a lot of wins.
(16:40):
I talked to a lot of farmers who say, you know what, Brian, I use this product. I cut back 25 pounds of nitrogen on this and I put the product and I saw no difference from where I had my full rate. That’s a good result, but I’m also going to say I’ve done 15 years of on-farm research with inreach studies in farmer fields, and I could usually cut them back 50 pounds anyways.
Mike Howell (17:04):
And to tie into that, going back to our statistics lesson, I’ve done a lot of work with Mississippi State over the years, and I’m sure you’ve done some work with Dr. Bobby Golden when he was at Mississippi State, we did countless cotton trials on those Deer Creek sands. You could put out 120 pounds of nitrogen, 180 pounds of nitrogen, and a lot of times it wouldn’t separate from the check. We didn’t get a nitrogen response. How do you know if you’re actually doing any good or not if you can’t separate it from the check?
Brian Arnall (17:29):
And that’s the problem in the field. I talked to farmers and I’ve talked to one of my former students. He’s going to probably hire on with one of these companies and he’s sold on it and he says, I applied X pounds less and put the product on, and I put the normal rate on the rest of the field and there was no difference. I said, well, did you put the less on and no product? My recommendation for producers is when you cut that rate by the 25 or 40 pounds and test it with the product, test it without the product too, have that check because you need to know maybe you were just 25 pounds over anyways, and so you didn’t need that extra 25 that you’re going to apply.
(18:08):
I’ve talked to a lot of folks that have seen good value in these. Just the data, early data, is saying that a lot of these products are producing nitrogen, but the amount of nitrogen may not be absolutely stable. We’re trying to get a handle on, okay, is it producing 10 pounds, 20 pounds or 30 pounds, and can we have an idea of where and when it’s going to produce low, medium or high amount of nitrogen?
Mike Howell (18:33):
And that brings up another point. That nitrogen target is a moving target. If we could predict the weather during the growing season, we could tell you exactly how much nitrogen you need, but depending on rainfall and other environmental factors, that’s going to have a big impact on how much nitrogen you really need. And we may get by with 40 pounds less nitrogen this year than we can next year.
Brian Arnall (18:53):
I talked to one company CEO and I talked to him about the project we’re doing, and this is one of our bigger companies that’s out there, and I asked him, I told him what I was doing and I wanted him to kind of pick holes at my research because I asked all these companies, this is what I’m doing. I want you to pick holes so that I do this right. And he told me that his product was really good at helping with marginal to minor stress, but if it was too much stress, you didn’t see a benefit.
(19:23):
And so as a researcher, I have a challenge trying to figure out where do I create, I’m trying to pick a nitrogen rate that’s a little bit under, but not too much under. So basically what he said is that if I stress a crop with too much nitrogen stress, his product won’t work. So I need a little bit of nitrogen stress, but not too much, which is on the research side, I’m looking at crops that my optimum nitrogen has a 100 pound swing from one year to the next.
Mike Howell (19:50):
Right? So how much is too much and how little is too little? It’s a very fine line in there.
Brian Arnall (19:55):
And that makes the research aspect tougher is like, where do we pick that rate? I’m going to stick with my fairly low rate and just see what happens and go from there. But we’re learning more about the environments that they work and they don’t.
Mike Howell (20:09):
We’ve spent a lot of time this morning talking about nitrogen products and how they work. Earlier you mentioned phosphorus products that would release phosphorus. What can you tell us about that?
Brian Arnall (20:18):
Yeah, so we have the in fixtures and organic matter decomposers, and by the way, biological or a microbe or an organism that breaks down organic matter will also release a phosphorus potassium magnesium and sulphur calcium chloride in the organic matter. We also have organisms that are either symbiotic symbiotes, which they’re making the root systems larger. They’re basically tying in and it’s usually fungal. You’re making a larger root system which will access more phosphorus, and so it makes a bigger route. So you can have come into contact with more phosphorus potassium, but there’s also new biology, this is at least what the scientists for the companies are saying, that is really good at extracting mineral or labile. So phosphorus is in couple points. You have plant available, labile and fixed. Labile is in between where it can be made plant available or be fixed for a basically turn back into rock phosphate, which is mined and then turned into fertiliser.
(21:18):
These organisms are able to go in there and break the chemical bonds of labile phosphorus and make them plant available. Plants are already doing that and we know some of our sorghum can do it, will extrude or exude organic acids which break that labile phosphorus chemical compound, chemical bond and make the phosphorus plant available. So we’re basically building on that. I think there’s some great opportunity for a product if it works that way in soils that have been historically manured, soils that have had heavily fertiliser applications, have a history of buildup, history of maintenance, a history of manure because you have those fixed phosphorus. What does concern me is I’ve already talked to a couple farmers who are using these products on what I would call wore out ground already.
(22:08):
So they’re going into ground with historic low soil test phosphorus applying these to try to extract even more, and I don’t like that balance. It’s putting a bandaid on a problem. If you have loyal low soil test phosphorus, that means your soil is out of balance. So I don’t like the concept of going into low soil test environment and using one of these P extractors. I don’t mind going into a high soil test or something that’s been historically fertilised and using them, but I think we can shift that data. We can mine the soil a little bit too much if we’re not careful.
Mike Howell (22:43):
And that just reminded me of a chart I saw a day or two ago. I don’t remember where I saw it, but it was a map of the United States and inside that map it had a number in each state that showed what percent of the soil tests were testing deficient in phosphorus and well over half of the states of the United States were testing deficient in phosphorus. If we’re already deficient, we don’t need to be trying to mine the last little bit out of it, like you said.
Brian Arnall (23:08):
So like I said, you go to the manured areas that have history. Even our northeastern part with we have a lot of litter makes a tonne of sense if you have historic phosphorus application and breaking some of those labile bonds or if you’ve been doing buildup and maintenance for the last 20 or 30 years, getting some of that fertiliser, I just don’t like it on the ground that that’s already low and maybe needs just to be built back up or maintained at minimum.
Mike Howell (23:33):
So the last category that you’ve mentioned was the sugars, and I know a lot of people put sugar out, especially these guys that are trying to win the high yield corn contest every year. That’s something I always hear them talking about, putting out sugar. So what’s the benefit of putting out sugar?
Brian Arnall (23:48):
The benefit of putting out sugar? We had our soil chemist teach us and we have a podcast. I would recommend the Red Dirt Agronomy podcast with Dr. Andrea Jilling, but it’s J-I-L-L-I-N-G. Phenomenal Soil Chemist in organic. She has a great way to speak on an extremely tough topic. She described in that, and at one of our winter crop schools that she’s done a tonne of work. She shows that if you apply sugar, you basically create and we know this is why we’re doing it, you ramp up those microbes to start breaking down organic matter.
(24:20):
You give them a little bit of glucose to really start breaking down and they go in after breaking down carbon, they want carbon. What happens, especially in our soils in Oklahoma and others I’d say in the southern plains and the southeast US, is that when you push those microbes, you get that immediate release and it happens.
(24:38):
She said it happens in a day or two, so you put it in and you get a day or two flush of nutrients, but it’s like an algae bloom in a pond. You push all the microbes, they really reproduce. Then all of a sudden they have no more food and they crash. It’s not a very stable, it’s this big ocean waves, you have big spike and a peak. For me, it’s kind of an intriguing concept is that especially the starter, you mentioned putting it on with the starter. I heard somebody talking the other day, maybe somebody else that they’d like sugar with the starter or the seed. Well, that’s releasing nutrients before you even have the seed emerging. You can have that crash and it could be go back in mineralization because you artificially forced the CDN ratio of the soil in one direction.
(25:20):
This is all we don’t know. We’re learning more about the functions, but absolutely, you put sugar on the soil, it will break down your organic matter if that’s your goal and you have organic matter to break down, hey, rock on. I just don’t think some of our soils can handle it that well.
Mike Howell (25:36):
I’m always amazed at how plants and humans are a lot alike in the way they use nutrients and other substances. But when you were telling that story, it reminded me back to my high school days, and you can’t tell it by looking at me now, but I used to run a little bit of track just because I had to. The football coach wouldn’t let us play football if we didn’t run track. That’s another story. But before we would get out and do our events, he would always hand us a snicker bar, so we were getting a lot of sugar. It would really ramp up our energy for that event, but you could feel that crash coming shortly after that. And it sounds like a lot of what you just described with the instant gratification and then the crash right after it.
Brian Arnall (26:13):
Yep. Dr. Jilling also talked about, and this was intriguing, I want to learn more, like I’m trying to learn more from the microbiologist, is that the plants can trigger that themselves. So the plants can actually trigger that breakdown when they have a need. I think we might be seeing science to try to understand in the near future, do we want to push that instant gratification or do we want the plants to signal the biome to react the way it needs to react when it wants to? So should we go with an artificial sugar push or should we let the biome actually be driving it and let the plants say when it needs it? I could see in our wheat system and other systems, we have a nice timeliness with our biome reacting to need in the spring green up when we start pushing plant development, when we get warm, we get moisture soils and we get wet.
(27:02):
That’s when we start ramping up organic matter mineralization, right at the time the wheat crop in our spring crops really need the most of those nutrients, and so the natural system to me is intriguing in the way that it can take care of itself at some time. So I see why folks are doing the sugar and I see why they get that reaction. I just don’t know in the long run, in some of our more lower organic matter soils, what the long-term effect or the winds might be.
Mike Howell (27:30):
What I’m hearing you say there is we don’t know what the long-term effects are. What’s it going to do to our soils down the road, but timing is going to be critical. If we’re going to do that, we’ve got to make sure that we get it out there to get those nutrients when the plants are actually going to need it.
Brian Arnall (27:44):
And so the early season shots of it when the plants aren’t really taking off and growing, I’m not a big proponent of doing sugar anyways because I don’t think it’s necessary, but for me, if you’re going to do sugar, do it during the most active growth time because that’s when the plant is actively growing. That point, if it’s corn crop when you’re going that V6 to V10, if it’s cotton crop, when you’re starting to get that heavy, that early flour and getting that heavy bowl load and you need those nutrients, but like you said, it’s that Snickers bar to that crop and it’s going to pan out.
Mike Howell (28:12):
I don’t have a lot of data on sugar and haven’t looked at it, but in my part of the world, and I assume in yours as well, if we apply very much sugar, I know that we will increase the fire ant population. They will definitely be there and somebody that’s out in the field looking at crops, we don’t want any more fire ants than we absolutely have to have.
Brian Arnall (28:29):
We have them [inaudible 00:28:30] southeast and I’m hoping we don’t get them in. Well, we’ve already [inaudible 00:28:33] a couple droughts and we moved a couple hay bells and all of a sudden we’ve got them in new counties. But we’re trying to keep that down.
Mike Howell (28:38):
Dr. Arnall, we’ve talked about a lot of information today. We really appreciate you joining us today. What’s your take home message for growers? What’s the one thing you want everybody to get from this programme today?
Brian Arnall (28:49):
For me, and I’m optimistically pessimistic about these microbes, right? We’ve got a bunch of players in the game. There’s a bunch of people that’s been on, I’ve been testing biologicals for the last 15 years, and if I find one that wins, I want to let everybody know we’re learning. But the amount of resources put into this direction now and the amount of science that we have tells me that we’re going to start finding winners. But I think what we’re seeing right now is a lot of products on the marketplace that may not quite understand their perfect fit, that they’re being developed in a region. So listeners, be cautious about what you’re doing. Understand the me mechanisms of the products that you’re wanting to buy and have a goal.
(29:32):
Do you want to reduce your nitrogen rate? Do you want to pull available phosphorus out and tie the right product potentially? But test, test, test and understand how to do on-farm testing. So you know the benefit, don’t just drop your rate by 25 pounds and add the product, drop your rate by 25 pounds, add the product and have a strip that doesn’t have the product, right? Test it and know what works for you.
Mike Howell (29:55):
Great advice, Dr. Arnall, once again, we appreciate you coming on as always. Last time you were on, we’re doing our tailgate series and football season’s over, and we’re not doing any tailgating right now. So I thought what we would do instead of doing our tailgating series is start a series on famous people in agriculture. They may be agronomists or contributed to agriculture in some other way, but we’ve got a list of people that we’re going to be talking about over the next several episodes. But the first one that comes to mind anytime you think about agronomy has got to be Dr. Norman Borlaug, he’s the father of the Green Revolution.
(30:30):
He’s done a lot of work with wheat. You mentioned wheat several times. He actually doubled the guilds of wheat in Mexico and brought a lot of that into United States, a lot of it in Asia and other countries as well. Dr. Borlaug didn’t start off in agriculture. He was a forestry major, got his BS in forestry, and then went to work and got a PhD in plant pathology, if I remember right.
Brian Arnall (30:52):
Yes, that’s right.
Mike Howell (30:53):
And I think his first job out of college was with DuPont. He was supposed to work with their microbiology products, looking at different fungicides and different things. But that happened in about 1942, just a month or so after Pearl Harbour and Dr. Borlaug wanted to join the military and go fight for our country, but the government wouldn’t let him join. They said he was too vital to the war effort in other areas, and they actually turned his lab into a testing lab to help the military, and one of the first projects he had to do was to devise a glue that would withstand heat and salt water. The reason for this is they were trying to get supplies into the soldiers at and the heat and saltwater was deteriorating the packaging, so they had to come up with a way, and it took him, I think, they said two weeks to develop a glue that they could fix that problem with.
(31:42):
Dr. Arnall, I’m sure you’ve studied Dr. Borlaug for a number of years. Any comments you want to make about Dr. Borlaug?
Brian Arnall (31:49):
For one, I had the honour of meeting him twice, and so he has been a long mentor. My major advisor, Bill Ron, worked with him at Simmons, had close ties with Dr. Borlaug. In fact, Dr. Borlaug helped support a lot of the green seeker technology that we did early down in Mexico. And so as a grad student, I went to Simmons at least once, if not twice a year in Mexico, India, and Asia. And so really close ties with Dr. Borlaug, an amazing man. I would suggest a good read for everybody is Our Daily Bread. It is a great biography about him talking about his time in the forestry service, being a fire watcher, going through all that, growing up on the farm, and then in his time moving into Mexico, and the transition of getting those semi dwarf wheats into India and other places.
(32:34):
And so really, I was honoured to get to meet him and kind of have a legacy of his work. He instilled a lot into my advisor, Dr. Ron, and it came down through. And so quite a passion for just serving people and a very amazing man.
Mike Howell (32:51):
Dr. Arnall, once again, we appreciate you being on the programme today and encourage our listeners to Google Dr. Borlaug and learn more about his contributions to the world of agriculture. So until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
