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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt, with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podKast 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. Hope you’re enjoying season two. We’re just getting season two underway. This is going to be our second episode of season two, and it’s corn planting time, at least down here in the South. I’ve seen planters rolling for a couple of weeks now and that’s going to continue moving further north as the temperatures warm up. I know some of you are still covered with ice and snow these days and think, “Corn planting will never get here,” but it’s going to warm up pretty soon.
(01:04):
To help us get in the mood of planting corn, I’ve got two guys with me here today that know a little bit about growing corn. I’ve got Fenton Eure with Nutrien Ag Solutions, and Heath Cutrell. Heath is a corn grower in Southern Virginia, and I’ll let him tell you a little more about himself. This year Heath won the award for having the highest yield in the country for corn growers, and I’ll let Heath tell us a little more about that. Heath, if you will, introduce yourself and tell our listeners a little more about you.
Heath Cutrell (01:30):
Hey, I’m Heath Cutrell. I farm, like you said, in southeastern Virginia, northeastern, North Carolina. We farm close to about 5,000 acres. We do about a third split rotation on corn and soybeans, and we farm a little bit of wheat as well.
Mike Howell (01:44):
And Fenton, if you would, introduce yourself to our listeners.
Fenton Eure (01:47):
I’m Fenton Eure, I manage the Nutrien location in Shawboro, North Carolina. Been working for Nutrien since 2009. Been working with Heath now since pretty well about 2012, off and on, but exclusively, the last three or four years he and I have worked together. Yeah, that’s pretty much where we’re at.
Mike Howell (02:06):
I first met Fenton probably 10 or 12 years ago. We were at a trade show trying to promote some products, and got to know him, and worked with him off and on quite a bit over the last 10 or 12 years. A really good agronomist and knows his stuff.
(02:19):
I just met Heath a couple of weeks ago. We were in North Carolina at the commodity conference, and everywhere I looked there was Heath and he had a group of people surrounding him. It seemed like he was a pretty popular person. I started asking some questions and found out that he had won the High Yield Contest. Heath, tell us a little bit about the contest and what your yield was.
Heath Cutrell (02:39):
So we’ve been messing with this National Corn Grower Association since 2015. I had a friend introduce me to it back then, and we had won for the state that year. And me being me, enjoying good competition, it wasn’t good enough, so we just continued on with it. And today, this past year, like I said, we won for the nation. I wasn’t expecting to win for the nation. We knew we had a good national win, but it was exciting to know that when we pushed forward over top everyone else.
Mike Howell (03:09):
And what was that final yield you had?
Heath Cutrell (03:11):
The final yield ended up being 394 bushels to the acre.
Mike Howell (03:15):
394 bushels, and I think that was an all-time record, wasn’t it?
Heath Cutrell (03:20):
It was for me, yes, sir.
Mike Howell (03:21):
Was that dryland corn or was that irrigated?
Heath Cutrell (03:24):
That was dryland corn.
Mike Howell (03:25):
394 bushels dryland. How in the world do you do that? What’s your secret?
Heath Cutrell (03:31):
Nutrien. More luck than anything, but since 2015 I’ve been playing with any kind of nutrients, anything that we could think to put on it, throwing the kitchen sink at it every year. You know, snake oils that work, snake oils that don’t work. But to be honest with you, one of the very biggest things that we believe in and use is ESN. We started using that as soon as they came out with it. They promoted it, we tried it on some wheat years ago, and we put just about on every single thing that we put in the ground this time.
Mike Howell (04:04):
Corn planting week, we understand that we’ve got to start off with a good stand and that’s something that everybody preaches, “We’ve got to start off with a good stand.” Fenton, what target plant population do y’all shoot for?
Fenton Eure (04:15):
Well, the normal target population in that area would probably run somewhere around 32,000. In these contest fields we were pushing that up considerably to get there. To be quite honest about it, this past year when Heath got his stand when he planted, it was probably the best seedbed that I’ve ever seen. The stands were unbelievable, I mean, I think every plant came up within 48 hours of each other.
Heath Cutrell (04:40):
And that was on 1,500 acres.
Fenton Eure (04:42):
I talked about that several times during the growing season, about how even if the plants came up in the population. And I think that’s a big key when we put this corn in the ground. Population is huge, but the big key to population, Mike, is to make sure that we’re getting this stuff up evenly and in as short a timeframe as possible.
Heath Cutrell (05:02):
And that comes along with owning a Case International Corn Planter. You were talking about population. He’s right. I think most people do plant about 32,000, but I’ve been at 38,000 on every acre of my farm now since about 2018.
Mike Howell (05:19):
Well, you mentioned the Case Planter, and I’m not going to promote Case over anybody else, I think there’s several good planters out there, but I know you use the red equipment. But what else do you do to make sure you get that stand coming up uniform? I know things like soil temperature and moisture are important. What do you look for before you decide to go put that seed in the ground?
Heath Cutrell (05:37):
So me personally, we’ll start with obviously waiting for a little bit of dry ground and we’ll do deep tillage with rippers. We’ll rip the hard pan up and we’ll come back with a few pieces of tillage equipment. And we’ll end up coming final with a field cultivator and a roller over the top just to kind of firm the ground before we plant the ground. I always say I know the seedbed’s right when I walk across the field and I feel like I’m sinking down to my ankles.
Mike Howell (06:04):
Fenton, anything to add to that?
Fenton Eure (06:05):
He gets a good seedbed, but then the things that we do, we’re using [inaudible 00:06:10] as a pop-up fertiliser underneath the row in-furrow. And then we got a blend that we’re putting on each side of the row two inches away, we’re dribbling it on the surface of some more starter… We also are putting down a good pre-plant fertiliser with N, P and K for whatever we need, and we are shooting for anytime we are crossing the field with nitrogen and a dry blend, that blend being at least 50% of the nitrogen coming from ESN.
Mike Howell (06:40):
Fenton, if you will, tell us a little bit about the base fertiliser programme and what you’re doing to make sure you get all the nutrients out there that crop needs.
Fenton Eure (06:48):
We’ve come up with a blend about… I don’t know, what, six years ago, Heath, maybe, that we kind of liked. We’re still soil testing, but most of the time we’re paying very little attention to the soil test come N, P and K because we knew the plants are going to need and our blend has been a…
(07:07):
We’re looking for about half of our total nitrogen in our pre-plant fertiliser. Of course phosphorous needs, we put a little bit out in the pre-plant. Most of our phosphorus comes in the starter, because the soils that we’re dealing with are phosphorus fixing soils, so we don’t typically have a lot of phosphorous needs to begin with.
(07:27):
We’re putting about half of our Potash, maybe a little better than half of our Potash act up front. And we putting a lot of micros in our fertiliser, we’re putting some boron in there, we’re throwing some magnesium in-
Heath Cutrell (07:40):
And sulphur.
Fenton Eure (07:40):
… there, a lot of sulphur going in there as well.
(07:43):
When you start talking about these yields, and I’ll let him tell you what his farm averages are more, but I mean we’re talking about these contest yields being up there in almost 400 bushels, but farm averages are very high as well. And so, we put a lot of fertiliser under those crops. We’re putting 38,000 plants to the acre out there so it takes more to feed 38,000 then it does to feed say 28,000. And then we’re coming back and we’re top dressing this stuff with some more nitrogen, and some more Potash, and some more magnesium.
(08:15):
When we started top dressing these crops with those higher rates of magnesium, we were having problems every year with magnesium deficiency and we’ve moved it around, we’ve figured out where that needs to go.
(08:27):
The other big key part of our fertiliser programme is we do a lot of tissue testing. We start tissue testing early and we tissue test right on through until almost black layer. We feel like this is a chance to push that corn in any way, shape, form or fashion. We want to be sure that it is never having a bad day.
(08:46):
I’ve got records going back five years on tissue testing and we’ve learned a lot by looking back, because we see sometimes something happening year after year. The second or third year we see it happening we’re like, “We need to change something,” because if we’re seeing a problem with the tissue test, obviously we’ve already missed an opportunity. And that’s my whole key, is to not miss any opportunity at all to make a crop.
Mike Howell (09:09):
And that’s one thing I want to point out, that we get calls all the time and… “The crop looks bad, it looks yellow, something’s wrong with it.” And by the time we get that call, and get there and look at, it’s really too late to make a correction. I really like the approach of tissue sampling whether you think you need to or not, you can pick up on things a lot quicker that way than waiting until you see a problem in the field.
Fenton Eure (09:29):
We start tissue testing pretty much about V3, and we keep a tissue test, like I say, right on almost the black layer. And I say, one year’s great, because like you said Mike, when we get a call or we go out and we take a tissue test, and we see that we’re deficient in boron or we’re deficient in magnesium or we’re deficient in whatever, we’ve already lost yield potential.
(09:50):
Now I’m not saying you can’t correct it at that point and make a crop out of it, but you’re never going to make the highest crop that you can. And that’s one thing that every person I’ve ever heard in the NCGA Yield Contest say, “To make high yields, you got to let that crop never have a bad day. It’s never got to want for anything from day one.”
Mike Howell (10:08):
That’s right. We’re talking a lot about nutrients so far, but in my part of the world one of the big limiting factors is water, and it just amazes me that you can grow that kind of corn on dry land conditions. So obviously you’ve had a lot of rainfall during the year, but that’s kind of a catch-22. You’ve got to have sunlight to keep that plant growing as well as the rainfall.
(10:27):
How does that work out Heath? How do you get enough rainfall and keep the sunlight there at the same time?
Heath Cutrell (10:33):
Our water table’s so high, you could actually take a spade shovel, dig two foot deep and watch water trickle into the bottom of it. That’s a big key that a lot of people don’t understand. Yes, we’re dry land, but at the same time a lot of the land that I work, the water table’s so high that it almost self feeds it. Now naturally this past year we did get dry in July and got hot, but as a all in all kind of deal we pretty much “do or cave,” as far as our water situation.
(10:59):
We most of the time fight water trying to get it away from the plants, then we would actually trying to look for water. We’re 20 minutes from the coast, so water most of the time isn’t the issue one way or the other. It would be harder for us to get it away. So our ditching system, we got to stay clean and make sure that everything is able to move out instead of come in.
Mike Howell (11:22):
We have a similar issue in the Mississippi Delta. We irrigate these crops and try to get the water on them, but you also have to get that water off in a timely manner too. It’s kind of a catch-22 situation.
(11:33):
Fenton, we’ve talked about fertiliser, we’ve talked about water and the need for water. What else does this corn crop need? How else are you managing this to ensure these high yields?
Fenton Eure (11:41):
Well Mike, one thing that we really believe strongly in is keeping somebody in the field scouting. We scout every two weeks, and then sometimes in between Heath and I are in the field ourselves looking at things to see what’s out there.
(11:56):
The big thing that we run into year over year lately has been stink bugs, and so we’re really out there looking for stink bugs and making sure we don’t get any damage from the stink bug out there. When we put on stink bug applications, and that’s a annual thing nowadays, it’s pretty much become a standard practise, we’re also putting fungicides on this corn. Heath said we don’t have much of a water problem, we either got too much or not enough, but it seems like when he’s deep tilling like that, he’s breaking through. We getting water from the bottom side up a lot of times.
(12:28):
One thing that we do have a lot of problem with is heat. So the fungicides help reduce the stress on the corn, and we’ve been able to, he and I, back in first week of August this past year, we were talking about how bad the corn looked, and how heat stressed it was, and how dry we had been, and there just wasn’t no way it looked like we were going to make a big yield this year. And when the corn rolled into field, we were pleasantly surprised, which walking in the field doing what we did, I’d already told him pretty much where I thought the yields were going to be at and it don’t always work out. Mike, his corn crop is usually planted over by 15 miles. So from the bottom of his farming operation to the top of his farming operation is 15 to 20 miles.
(13:10):
So this past year the northern corn got water just at the right time and when I say, “got water,” I mean we’re talking about two, maybe 3/10 of an inch of rain, but it just kept the heat down inside that crop enough for it to get pollinated.
(13:24):
The southern part of the crop, it fared a lot worse than that. It didn’t get rain when it needed it, so we’re trying to mitigate stress anywhere we can. We also looking at a lot of foliar products that we can put on the corn that will help feed it through the leaf too. Obviously corn plants are very, very structured, very, very well, but when you start pushing these yields up to where we’re looking at these yields going, you can put all the nutrients in the grain but you just can’t get enough nutrients into the plant through the root system a lot of times. We’re dependent on putting it over the top as well.
Mike Howell (13:59):
Fenton, one of the things that both of you have mentioned, and I guess this question can go to both of you, you both mentioned using ESN in this programme. Tell us a little bit about that, maybe some of our listeners haven’t heard of that, and why you think ESN is helping so much in this production system?
Fenton Eure (14:13):
I’ll take lead on this one.
(14:15):
A few years ago we did a test with a grower of ours, with Heath, but it was another grower, and we didn’t change the total nitrogen applied, we just changed how we were putting it out. Well, we didn’t really change how we were putting it out, we just changed the product we were putting it out with. When we went over the top with our over the top programme, the grower standard was to put it out with a urea or something of that nature. And we went with ESN on part of the field, we went with the urea on the other part.
(14:44):
That particular grower won the North Carolina Yield Contest that year with a yield of 295 bushels to the acre. He bested the standard programme by 40 some bushels. So talking to Dr. Ron Heiniger and he doing some of the mathematics with everything, we figured it out that we didn’t put any more corn on the stalk at the time. What we did is we actually filled the grains out fuller. Some of that corn was coming about with 64.5 pound chest weight. So what that told me was we need to keep the nitrogen in the plant longer to be able to get full potential.
(15:21):
With ESN going in like we do over the top of he’s corn, we’re actually giving that corn a lot of nitrogen that’s going to be out there, because the ESN works over a period of time, it’s a polymer coated product, it has microscopic pores in it, and it takes temperature, and it takes moisture to get it to release to the crop. So it is not laying out there volatilizing, or running off, or anything like that. It’s just waiting for the corn to need it. And the good news about it is the polymer coating releases the nitrogen pretty much on the same temperature of moisture curve as the corn growth curve. So we’re not releasing a bunch of nitrogen right there for the late air wait, we’re releasing it and it’s getting taken up pretty quick when we’re putting it out there.
(16:07):
I’m a big firm believer in ESN on any kind of a crop that needs nitrogen, that it will feed longer and utilise more of a nitrogen we’re putting out there. I’ve seen all kinds of studies, but if you put like a urea out there, they say you probably only get like 60% of what you put out there. I think with ESN you’re probably looking at more like 90%, yeah, not a 100%
Heath Cutrell (16:30):
And they say what, 30% will volatize-
Fenton Eure (16:33):
Yeah.
Heath Cutrell (16:33):
… from urea versus ESN where it’ll stick right there, use up just about every inch of it.
Mike Howell (16:38):
Well that’s what we want to hear. Anything we can do to protect that nitrogen investment, especially as much as that nitrogen’s costing these days. We want to keep that nitrogen in the field and make it available for that crop to use.
Fenton Eure (16:49):
Yeah Mike, and the other thing about that whole deal is if we’re keeping it in the field and we’re using it up, we’re protecting the environment. We’re not putting it down the ditches, into the streams and the waterways, and so I think that’s a huge win for the environment as well.
Mike Howell (17:03):
That’s exactly right.
(17:04):
Now Heath, you mentioned that you’re growing about 5,000 acres is this Yield Contest field? I know a lot of these guys, they’ll pick out one or two fields and really shoot for high yields in one field and then the rest of the crop they just form like everybody else. I understand you do things a little different on your operation.
Heath Cutrell (17:21):
Yes. We try to treat every acre the same at the beginning and then what we’ll do is we’ll walk around or look around, see where what we think is going to be the best corn, and we’ll figure it out along the way. And then, that’s when we’ll start throwing a little more what we think the best corn’s going to be. We’ll do it that way along with…
(17:40):
Like this past year, like he said, we were getting little rains north of our farm. We had already been in there, we knew it was really good corn, magnificent corn.
(17:49):
We had a place in North Carolina where we thought we were going to have really good corn, but as we know we had a lot of heat and a lot of drought in North Carolina, so we just kind of washed that away. But all in all, well like I said, we trying to treat everything the same until we get closer to the end or we know where we got our perfect stand or just anything that’s leading up to that.
Mike Howell (18:08):
Now early on you mentioned that you tried a lot of snake oils, now some that did work, some that didn’t. Are there any of those quote, “snake oils,” that you want to talk about? What kind of products are we talking about? Which ones may work and what have you found that doesn’t work?
Heath Cutrell (18:21):
He’s my pencil man, so I’ll let him tell you what… I do know what works, but I mean he’s the one that pushes the product, so
Fenton Eure (18:28):
We talked a little bit about Levitate earlier in-furrow and I think that’s a real game changer in getting the corn out of the ground evenly, is to have something in-furrow. So that’s been one of our early go-to products for a good while now. The second thing that we do is we use Radiate.
Heath Cutrell (18:46):
That is a great product.
Fenton Eure (18:47):
It’s strictly a growth hormone, it just regulates the root growth and promotes root growth. Beyond that, we’ve tried a lot of other things-
Heath Cutrell (18:56):
And Titan.
Fenton Eure (18:57):
… we use Titan on all of our fertiliser. Every acre gets Titan on the dry fertiliser, but we put the nitrogens that. We’ve tried to put a nitrogen stabiliser on the urea to help stabilise that, and we do use urea along with the ESN as well. And we also use ammonium sulphate to get sulphur into the mix. We try to balance it out so we haul urea out there, but we get some stuff out there to work fast and then we get ESN out that lasts longer. We do all use nitrogen stabilisers on all of our nitrogen products except for the ESN, we don’t put that on that. He’s tried some stuff, third party stuff. Some of it’s worked like he says, some of it doesn’t. We’re going to be kind of quiet about what those products are just because some of it we don’t want to tip our hand too much on.
Mike Howell (19:43):
I understand. I understand.
(19:47):
You’ve mentioned that Fenton brings you ideas and he really works with you hand in hand to make this process work. What’s the craziest thing he’s ever came to you with and said, “Hey, let’s try this,” and did it work or didn’t it work?
Heath Cutrell (20:01):
I got to be honest with you, I don’t think he’s ever brought anything too crazy to me. He knows I don’t do crazy. Everything that he brings to me… Well, let me back up. I’ll say this, I trust him just as if he was my older brother, a lot older brother. He’s a great guy to work with. I can’t think of anybody else I’d want to work with. And when you create a relationship like that with someone, that means a lot and especially the guy that you buy your fertiliser from. I mean you got to really trust that guy and that company.
(20:29):
With that being said, he doesn’t come to me with any kind of crazy thoughts, and we’ll sit down and talk about what he wants to do. We’ve been in this programme so long now that we kind of know what’s been working, what hasn’t been working, we’re just tweaking now, that’s all we’re doing, there’s… We’re not getting big bushels any more outside of what we’ve been doing. I think we were increased our bushels by what, three or four bushels this past year versus last year, that’s the… We are throwing the kitchen sink at it now.
(20:59):
This past year you’re talking about did different things that we did. We tried chicken litter. Did it work? Yeah, that did work, that gave us a few extra bushels on that particular farm. But as far as getting to the top end of our coin, I think we’re there. We just got to fine tune everything from here on out and maybe there are a few more additives that we need to find or look at and place in our programme.
Fenton Eure (21:23):
Yeah, Mike, on that same topic, the long-term goal for us we started was to get 400 and we’re four bushels away. What’s 2023 going to bring? We don’t have any clue. I mean since it came out that Heath won the national this year, I probably fielded 25 calls from folks saying, “Tell me what this guy’s doing?” And I said, “Man, it ain’t about what he’s doing. He’s in a part of the world that most people…” I mean you go to say to the western part of North Carolina, they don’t have the water table that we have. That’s a huge thing. He works some of… As good a land as there is anywhere in the eastern part of the United States, I mean he’s on some really good soils. Are they spectacular as the soils out in the Midwest, no, we’re far from that. I mean, we’re dealing with maybe six inches of topsoil in a lot of places where they probably dealing with two foot out there, but it is really good land.
(22:19):
The thing that we’re still looking at now is fine-tuning as Heath said. I think it’s going to be small things. He and I were talking the other week, we’re going to look at playing around with our fertiliser rates a little bit on some things. Maybe we can trim some cost out of this programme and keep the yields where we’re at, looking at some data that we’ve seen this year and some of the winter meetings.
(22:40):
I’ll say that that’s a huge thing that we do. We attend a lot of meetings throughout the year, he and I both, and we look at everything, we analyse it and some of it we use and some of it we don’t. Some of it we talk about and we tweak on it. There’s a few new products out there. Maybe we can get another 2, 3, 4 bushel yield out of this thing. Who knows?
Heath Cutrell (23:00):
And we got a couple ideas for this year, already we’re buying-
Fenton Eure (23:03):
We’ve already got a couple ideas that we’re going to look at this year to see if we can push it, get it where we want to be. But I mean, and I have talked about it several times, the sky’s the limit. Where can we go on this yield? I mean, we know there’s been some yields out there in the 5 and 600 bushels, but I think in reality the 400 for us is going to be a pretty top day based on where we’re located in the conditions we’re growing here so-
Heath Cutrell (23:26):
And damn proud of the 400.
Fenton Eure (23:27):
Yeah, so-
Heath Cutrell (23:28):
I’m kind of proud of that 396.
Mike Howell (23:32):
And I know a lot of people that are jealous of that kind of guild and would love to be able to get there.
(23:36):
Guys, we really appreciate you being on and sharing a little bit of your success with us, telling us some things we need to watch out for, and things we need to look for.
(23:43):
What we kind of do here at the end now is we’ve started a new section and we’re talking about famous agronomists or famous people that have contributed to agriculture, and today we’re going to talk about somebody that’s really changed the corn world. Have either of you ever heard of George Harrison Shull?
Heath Cutrell (24:00):
Yes, sir.
Mike Howell (24:01):
That’s a name you may have heard way back in college there, Fenton, but I had to go back and do some digging to find out everything about him. But he coined the term, “Heterosis” back in 1914.
(24:12):
And for our listeners, what heterosis is, combined in two different parents to make a hybrid offspring. Now we know that all of our corn grown commercially today is a hybrid, and by doing this, George Shull was able to increase yields 25 to 50% per acre. Now, he first described this back in 1908, he made his first crosses, but it was about 10 years later before the first commercial hybrids were released.
(24:38):
But during his career, he developed a bunch of hybrids. He won numerous awards. He founded the Journal of Genetics in 1916 and acted as the editor of that for about nine years, and as associate editor for many years after that. In 1940, he was honoured with the DEKALB Agriculture Association Medal, and in 1949 he was honoured with the Marcellus Hartley Medal of National Academy of Sciences.
(25:03):
One fun fact about this, Fenton, you’re probably old enough to remember this movie, the movie, “High Time,” with Bean Crosby. That’s a little before my time, but there was a reference to George Shull in that movie. This movie was about an older gentleman that went back to school to get his bachelor’s degree, and he was studying with some of his younger fraternity brothers and asked the question, “Who discovered the process of Heterosis?” And there was a discussion about that in the movie. So we want to remember George Shull and thank him for his contributions to the corn world.
(25:34):
With that we’re going to wrap up this episode. We want to invite all our listeners to tune in next time, we’ll have another exciting episode. I think next week we will be talking about potatoes and what it takes to grow a successful potato crop. So until next time, this has been Mike Howell with, “The Dirt.”
