Marvin1982 - 1/23/2025 06:58
easymoney - 1/23/2025 06:32
Very good post.
A problem I see with these products is you have retail sales agronomists who have zero clue how soils and plants function. How is a farmer supposed to get educated and do a better job when the people they're supposed to go to don't really have an understanding themselves? How many times have you gone into your local retailer and seen a poster on the wall that says mycorrhiza fungi eliminate the phosphorus addiction, It will never happen.
They are there to sell you a product and you are supposed to get a response. So we've been ingrained that if we spend $20 on a product we need x number of bushels back to pay for that product and if we don't get the response then it's clear that that product did not work on our farm.
It's not that these quality products don't work. It's that we are farming in a manner that we are bypassing the natural relationship of a plant to the soil. And we're only using yield to check them. How many people are going to soil test and plant test throughout the growing season to see if we made any changes?
If we buy some of these types of products but we dump it in a seed trench along with high salt fertilizer, fungicide and insecticides, and soil that doesn't have much carbon for the bugs to live on and is also lacking oxygen. And then we come back in season with how many more fungicide insecticide and herbicides. How on Earth are these products supposed to give you their best day? The retail ag sales system we are farming under is designed to bypass these products hence the reason we need so many of the chemicals.
So true. Learn your soils. Test your soils for biology, learn how to increase that biology. If you build it, it will naturally start doing a lot of the work these fungicides and fertilizers do. It takes a few years, but once you start, you will start to see the difference. Test your soils for fungal/bacterial ration. Get them to be as close to 50/50 as you can. Most are heavy in bacteria. Fungal strains are your plants natural defense systems. We have tons of information at our fingertips just start researching. My first place I started when I learned the coop wasn't my best friend was searching Mycorrhiza on Google. The good fungi in our soils. That was exactly 5 seasons ago and man, the changes that have happened on my farm has been amazing. No more hard clods in the soils. Better water holding capacity, more nutrient availability. Everything I researched is coming true. It takes time. It isn't a one year fix. My only regret is I wished I had done all of my acres right from the beginning instead of Test zones. My fields I started with are my best yielding fields. There are a lot of naysayers out there but I guess if that is how they feel, then so be it. I do it all without expensive cover crops too. Not to say that cover crops can't help, for me it was expensive, cost me $44 an acre and the other products I am using are less than that by a long ways.
how HUMIC ACID is misused and misunderstood
