00:00:00 Beware of saving yourself into prosperity. And also are you thinking about the long-term cost of changing up your rotation? 00:00:06 Those are two things we're gonna discuss with Matt Miles in this episode of Extreme Ag Cutting the Curve. 00:00:11 Welcome to Extreme Ag Cutting the Curve podcast where real farmers share real insights and real results to help you improve your farming operation. 00:00:21 And now here's your host, Damien Mason. Hey there. Welcome to another fantastic episode of extreme Ag and the Curve. 00:00:27 You know, I've been asking all of the extreme ag guys, Hey, what are you changing up in 2025? 00:00:31 What are you changing? And I like talking to Matt because he reminds me of that statement, if you wanna make small changes, change what you do. 00:00:37 You wanna make big changes, change how you think, change how you look at things. So he says, you know what, dam, I just, uh, 00:00:43 I gotta tell you, I was looking at how my rotation actually has a longer term cost because if I change up my rotation, 00:00:50 I lose yield the following year. That's something that's very important for you if you're thinking about not doing soybeans, 00:00:56 for instance, this year, because, uh, all of a sudden they're not worth much. So we're gonna get into that. But the first thing he said 00:01:01 was, you know what? I made some big changes last year. It ended up costing me. It turns out, by not spending a little bit of money, 00:01:07 I cost myself bigger money. So that's where we're gonna dig in. I call it beware of saving yourself into prosperity, 00:01:12 because you sometimes you can't, it sounds good to spend less now, but six months, 12 months, 20 months down the road, 00:01:21 it might be that that savings cost you. And you said that you relied too much on litter and you're not gonna do that this year. 00:01:26 You're gonna go back to spending a little bit more on fertility. Yeah, that's exactly right. 00:01:31 And then, and the thing about that is once you figure out that you made a mistake, you can't correct it. 00:01:36 So, you know, I, I thought in last year I thought we, you know, we had two tons of litter on, on about 350 acres. And I said, okay, we've got the analysis 00:01:45 of the potassium's enough that we can get by. You know, we're not going to set any records where we can get by, flew over the crop on the way back from 00:01:52 an extreme ag field day or something, uh, looked down, looked down on the ground, and I could see purple halfway through my fields. 00:01:59 But that's a telltale sign. Or I guess you say red purple. That's a telltale sign that I was running out of. 00:02:04 I was running out of potassium. So I took a, I saved, you know, and, and I, I don't have the numbers in front of me, 00:02:10 but I say $50 an acre, $50 an acre, you know, not applying my normal potassium needs, thinking okay, I've got some in reserve, 00:02:20 or I've got some that we can get unlocked or whatever, and end up costing me $150 an acre to do that. So, you know, it wasn't total fields, 00:02:28 but it was in the low CCC soils. And I knew better, but I was trying to make sure that my bottom line worked out. 00:02:35 So not only did, did I, I, yeah, I saved 50, but if I cost myself 150, I net lost a hundred. Mm-hmm. And just aggravated the 00:02:43 situation that I was trying to fix. So there's, uh, this is not an uncommon situation. Things get a little tight. 00:02:50 Business owners, whether you're a ag producer or in any business, you think, Hey man, we got cut back on the spend. 00:02:57 I always point out there's a lot of small business. Think, think first thing they cut is their marketing. Well, okay, you, you, 00:03:02 you didn't spend 50 grand last year on your marketing and outreach, but also you lost $200,000 of new revenue. Did you really save anything? It's the same thing. 00:03:11 Uh, it sounds good upfront to have the savings 'cause it's money you've already got, but it's pretty easy then to look down the road 00:03:19 and say, yeah, they're a hundred dollars loss. Well, and, and I, and I've preached this my whole life, you know, if you're gonna cut corners, 00:03:25 make sure the corners you cut are corners you can do without fertility's. Not one of 'em. You know? 00:03:30 Now, I did have in my mind that, that I, I felt like, you know, if you looked at the numbers, I have enough fertility out there to make 00:03:36 that cotton crop conditions that we went in through the year, you know, some of it didn't get released, some of it didn't, you know, probably leach through from my, 00:03:44 you know, past soil samples and mm-hmm. I just, you know, I used this statement a lot. You know, be careful what you wish for. 00:03:50 I was wishing for being able to do this on lesser fertilizer, and I did, but it cost my myself some money from the potential 00:03:57 that I would've had, had I stayed the course. You know, a lot of times, as farmers are humans alone, you know, we can't see the trees for the forest 00:04:04 or forest for the trees and, and again, and, you know, we're just trying to save that money and that does look good and makes you feel good. 00:04:12 The problem is, is when it don't work, and like in a fertility situation like that, once I flew over that cotton 00:04:18 and I knew that it had that red tint to it, I knew I didn't even have to, I knew exactly what my problem was from, 00:04:24 from a thousand feet up in the air, whatever we were. But it's too late to fix. That's What I'm saying. Is there any, is 00:04:29 there any remedying it because you think you could have gotten in there and said, okay, crap, I relied too much on chicken litter. 00:04:35 I didn't do enough application of potassium. Right. When it was, you know, critical points, there was no way to go out and do drops 00:04:42 and drop in potassium, uh, some type of a late season. There's no saving. Oh, I got real smart there. 00:04:49 I, yeah, I tried to, I tried to put a bandaid on it at that point, spent some additional money mm-hmm. Trying to fix it that never really, never really paid off. 00:04:57 Once you get, once you get to a certain point on a cotton plant, it's a real finicky plant. 00:05:02 And once you get to the point, if you can see it, and this is in any crop, if you can see it visually, you've probably already screwed up. 00:05:08 Now you can turn it back green. I could have put enough nitrogen on there to turn it back. Green prime example, 00:05:14 I could have turned that cotton back green. Nobody would ever known the difference until it opened up. But nitrogen's not what it needed, needed potassium. 00:05:21 So even though I could change the color of that crop Yeah. And make myself feel better, 00:05:25 I wasn't gonna get any more yield and spend more money doing it. Yeah. So you could have made the plant look better, 00:05:31 but it w the deficiency was still gonna be there for the yield. Yeah. And we knew that early. 00:05:36 I knew early that I had messed up and my dad always caught it cutting your nose off to spite your face. 00:05:41 I don't really understand what that means. That's an old timer way of saying things. But you just figure out 00:05:46 My parents, my, my parents said that also. Yeah. Um, You gotta figure out the places you can cut that won't cost you that there's no chance 00:05:53 of costing you additional money later. So answer me this, this is a year here we are recording this January of 2025. 00:06:00 There's gonna be a lot of farm operators that listen to our stuff here at Extreme Ag and they're gonna say, you know what? 00:06:05 I'm looking at how I can save big, and there's a cautionary tale because all the other guys talked about 00:06:11 ways to reduce spend. And we did a webinar about how to reduce spend. Our January webinar was about reducing spend. 00:06:19 Reducing spend is always smart, but it's not always smart, right? You just gotta figure out the places. 00:06:26 You've gotta know your land and know your operations, not just the land. You gotta know your budgets. 00:06:30 You gotta know your financial side. And then you've gotta find the places that you can cut that will become unnoticeable in an ROI. 00:06:39 Does that make any sense? Makes a lot of sense. So here's the thing. The person listen to this is saying, yeah, great. 00:06:45 I'm no further ahead than when I tuned into this episode. Where am I supposed to spend? 00:06:49 The problem is it's different everywhere. You know, it could be soil type, it could be crop, it could be, uh, history. 00:06:56 It could be, there's a lot of things that play into this. Your particular place where you're going to, you tried 00:07:02 to save it was specific to, to potassium. And you thought that, you thought that, um, that chicken litter was gonna fill in for it. 00:07:13 Where, you know, think of, think of other people that don't even use chicken lit. Where might they be looking at how they could save 00:07:19 and it ends up being a mistake? Well, on the flip side of that, so we've told the, you know, I'm the guy that co goes to casino 00:07:26 and tells how much he lost and how much he won. Right? So we lost on that potassium deal. We did do a study on nitrogen reduction and we won on that. 00:07:35 Uh, the, the corn that we did the nitrogen reduction on, I saved money there. I went from one to 1.2 pounds per nitrogen per bushel down 00:07:43 to seven tenths, made the same yield on those plots, is what I did on my farm average. So there was a win there. 00:07:49 So when I say you gotta know your farm, know your soils, you've also gotta know your agronomy 00:07:54 to know there's some nutrients you probably can cut back. We've been applying too much nitrogen for eons, you know, so 00:08:01 I did find out one thing, potassium's not the place. I'm gonna cut nitrogen's a place that I'm probably gonna try to keep tweaking with that same deal. 00:08:09 Alright, so nitrogen, well, extreme ag, we did this with Kelly, we did this with Johnny Ral. We are seeing a lot of, uh, most of the guys are looking at 00:08:17 how you can peel back. If you take 10% of nitrogen spend, that's significant money. So you think, uh, the place that a person's looking 00:08:25 to dial back, start with nitrogen, not with potassium. If he's already, if he's already, if he's not already cut his nitrogen back, you know? 00:08:34 And then if he thinks he's putting out the old normal 1.2 pounds per bushel, I think try some, do that whole hog. 00:08:40 Probably not. 'cause everybody's farming management capabilities are different. But you, you know, like Chad says this all the time, 00:08:47 every farm, there's not a successful business in the world that don't have research and development in their 00:08:53 business except for farmers. Some of 'em do, but every, every successful business has that. So get a research 00:09:00 and development set aside some acres on your farm and that way, you know, under your operation, under your management skills, 00:09:07 what works and what don't work. Exactly. Unfortunately, That's the first time I ever tried to do it with potassium and it bit me in the butt. So 00:09:14 The person that's saying, you know, your, your cautionary tale is beware of trying to save yourself and your farm into prosperity. 00:09:20 You can do some cost, some cost reduction. We have made that point. You think nitrogen's the low hanging fruit 00:09:25 to use Kelly's favorite term? Probably not necessarily potassium. Uh, it's probably not in micros either. 00:09:30 What we're learning from our guys, you know, Johnny talks about zing. Chad talks about boron. 00:09:34 You know, pulling $3 an acre out of micros maybe isn't the place either, because usually we're under micro, am I right? 00:09:41 Yep. For the most part, the general farm is not applying enough micros to get the full yield potential. 00:09:48 Uh, alright. But we're talking about fertility. I wanna remind you about Nature's Nature's our business partner here at Extreme Ag. 00:09:52 They are focused at nature's on providing sustainable farming solutions to help you maintain your crop's potential. 00:09:58 You know what? Things are a little bit tight out there. We know that, but we're talking about fertility. We're talking a place where you can spend, well 00:10:03 what about using nature's high quality liquid fer fertilizers that are powered by nature's bio Okay? Can target specific periods 00:10:09 of influence throughout the growing season via precision placement techniques. You can use their products 00:10:14 to mitigate plant stress and enhance your crop yield. Most importantly, boost your farms. ROI go to natures.com all right, rotations, 00:10:22 long-term cost. You're gonna do a bet with Kelly that we're gonna see when we're at his field day at the end of June in area in Iowa. 00:10:32 You're gonna grow soybeans up there and prove to him that you can make money doing it. 'cause he's pulling out of soybeans, with the exception 00:10:39 of this challenge plot between, was it you, him, temple and Chad? Maybe? Yeah, there's four of us in that. 00:10:45 Um, other than that, he's not really growing soybeans and because he says, Hey man, soybeans just aren't profitable. 00:10:49 I had my cost, uh, miscalculated, whatever. But you're saying, you know what cautionary tale, look at the year following the year following 00:10:59 because you changed up your rotation and yeah. Maybe looked like it was okay this year, but the bonus yield you get the following year 00:11:08 by rotating crops can be a, a cost that you don't think about now. Yeah. And that's, and that's mainly backwards of 00:11:15 what Kelly's So what Kelly's doing, you know, he'll be corn on corn. I, I don't have a lot of experience with that. 00:11:20 Corn's relatively new in the, in the delta. But where I'm going with this, it's totally opposite of that. 00:11:26 Having that corn in the rotation to increase the value of the crops before, you know, we, we, we have a chance to have multiple crops. 00:11:33 That's one of the advantages we have down here is if one price is low, we can plant more. 00:11:38 The other, you know, I got in a while here again, just like the potassium deal, you know, I call these kneejerk reactions and I'm, 00:11:45 and I'm 56 years old this past week and I, and I've learned that kneejerk reactions will cost you more money than anything you do. 00:11:52 So my kneejerk reaction last year was, I can make more net profit per acre off of soybean acre than I can a corn acre. 00:11:59 No question on paper, no question. It was a better deal. What I've seen as harvest came along beans 00:12:05 behind beans on low sea sea soils with heavy root knot damage. We lost about, I'm gonna say we lost about seven bushels an 00:12:13 acre from the previous year that was behind corn. Okay. Alright. So wait a minute. So beans on beans, uh, like you said, it works better in 00:12:24 the delta region of Arkansas maybe than it was does up in, in Kelly Garrett's. 00:12:28 That's why you're gonna do this competition. You're telling me he's doing it wrong, which was really kind of half joking. 00:12:33 But the reality is you do fine on soybeans where you are. Except if you do soybeans on soybeans, 00:12:41 you lost seven buck, seven bushels an acre, even at nine bucks. That's $56 an acre. 00:12:47 And that's almost probably enough to put you at, uh, below breakeven. That was just, that was just 00:12:54 by going back on the same soil. That's not even including the extra yield bump from the corn, which is gonna be another five 00:13:01 By the way, seven times 9 63. Jesus, you probably just said to yourself, Hey, wait a minute, Damien, I know you went 00:13:05 to a country elementary school, but seven times 9 63, so, so $63. Well, aren't we at a point 00:13:11 where $63 is almost your profit margin on a, on a acre of beans and these kind of commodity prices, They, we just, probably not even your 00:13:17 profit, it's your break even. And right now we're looking at is break even. Yeah. You know, that's something we get tied up on farming. 00:13:23 If we can make all of our land commitments and all of our equipment commitments and we break even after that, farmers still made money. 00:13:31 You know, most of the time a farmer's living pretty good. Yeah. He, he makes those payments, 00:13:35 he's making some kind of equity payment. So it ain't always gotta be about what you get above, you know, your cost of production if 00:13:43 you're including everything in there. But yes, to answer your question, that if we make $63 an acre across the board this year on 00:13:49 every crop I'll be, I'll be singing and song and a dance. Hey, Can I ask you a question? So, 00:13:54 where I'm from in the Midwest, we know we hear people that have really good soils, not necessarily like mine, but really good more of the prayer type soils. 00:14:01 They can do corn on corn on corn, continuous corn. And we've had some of my fields that were corn four or five years in a row. 00:14:07 But, um, what I'm wondering is that's the one where they always talk about you get bigger incidents of rootworm and obviously you have nitrogen, 00:14:13 nitrogen, uh, depletion. What's the problem with soybeans on soybeans that rotating back into corn 00:14:20 or something else makes it so much better? How do you lose seven bushels of soybeans when I don't think of any of those traditional things. 00:14:28 I don't think of rootworm problems. I don't think of any, uh, fertility depletions, Well, there's no, there's soybean. 00:14:35 Don't put nothing back in the soil, but nitrogen, you know, a corn plant puts all kind of things organic matter, you know, 00:14:42 nitrogen back in the soil's, different things. The soybeans, more of a robber cotton, the same way, you know, they're, they're more of a, a fertility hog 00:14:49 and they don't put nothing back. Back. And where I lost this money was in low CC soils, leachable fertility soils with heavy root knot damage. 00:14:58 You can plant beans on beans on our heavy clays and you can get by with it. But I'm talking specifically about, which is the majority 00:15:04 of the ground I farm the lower CCC soils. Same thing with cotton. You know, I said it's a robber. I was literally running my picker in one field 00:15:13 and I was subpar yields from where I wanted to be right across the ditch. I'd had corn on it the year before. 00:15:19 I could tell I said, that's gonna be probably 200 pounds better corn, 00:15:24 I mean 200 pounds better cotton on the other side of this ditch. I couldn't wait to get there just 00:15:28 to see if I was anywhere close. Cotton on cotton is where I was cotton followed by follow cotton following corn across the ditch. 00:15:37 We got over there and picked that fields 200, 223 pounds difference. So just say 200 pounds of 70 cents, $140 an acre. Mm-hmm. 00:15:46 Right. If I lose less than $140 an acre by growing corn, even if I'm losing, I'm picking it up the next year. 00:15:55 Now you'd have to figure interest in there, but just say I lost a hundred bucks an acre. I'm making a 40 of that back the next year. 00:16:01 It's kinda like catfish farming. I know you don't know a lot about that, but you buy the fingerlings and it may be two years 00:16:07 before you produce a fish. Mm-hmm. And I kind of use corn that way. And, and I, in years past, I've justified growing corn, 00:16:14 even though when it didn't have as high ROI, because I knew what the value of the rotational f value was of the corn the following years on my other crops. 00:16:23 I did the knee-jerk thing this year. It was so, it was in a negative, not just that it wasn't as high ROI as some of the other crops. 00:16:29 Mm-hmm. But it was a negative in my, in my books. And I, I still, I still net lost money by do doing it the way I've done it. 00:16:37 Yeah. So your answer to somebody that's thinking about making a big change in 2025 and saying, you know what, I'm gonna change 00:16:43 up my crop mix completely. You're like, Hey, that's fine because we're all about trying new things. 00:16:47 But be, be cognizant of the idea, the fact that one year down the road you, you might really take a, you would, you've taken a yield setback multiple times 00:17:01 because of not rotating. Yes. I mean that, that's what happened to me last year and, and what I would advise a farmer to do, 00:17:08 and you're, if you're still farming in today's world, if you made it through this past year, you're a pretty good farmer. 00:17:14 Mm-hmm. Whatever's been working for you. Don't go trying to ripple the water too much from what's been working you year in and year out. 00:17:23 Yeah. In 2025, you might not have a as good a profit as you did in 22, but you gotta have a 10 year plan, not a one year plan. 00:17:31 That knee-jerk plan don't work out. I like it. So I think we can leave it there. What's your last advice, guidance for 2025? 00:17:39 About changes or no changes? Well change the things that you can and don't change the things 00:17:44 that you're scared that might mess you up. And, and, uh, beware of trying to save your, your farm into prosperity 00:17:52 because yes, it's good to be frugal, it's good to be conscious of expenses, but uh, you make wholesale changes, uh, 00:17:59 it can come back to bite you in the butt. It's all what goes to the bank. His name's Matt Miles. I'm Damien Mason. 00:18:05 Um, we do a lot of cool stuff here at Extreme Ag, you know that 'cause you keep up with it. Hundreds of videos just like this on the Extreme 00:18:12 mag.farm website. We also have a awesome YouTube channel and you can go there and see, and it's like a library 00:18:18 of information that's free for you to use. We are gonna have a field day at Miles Farms on, uh, June 12th. 00:18:23 I'm gonna be there. McGee, Arkansas. It's in DHA County. You ought to be there June 12th. 00:18:30 They always start in the morning because as Matt says, it's like little Vietnam. So if you don't start in the morning, it could be 112 00:18:35 and humid as heck in the afternoon. So we're gonna start at what time? Eight in the morning. I think it, I think it starts at eight o'clock 00:18:41 And we'll be done at lunchtime. Come in. And last year we were there, we had a, had a nice lunch, catered in some, uh, awesome food 00:18:49 and I think we, we had some, maybe we had some fried catfish at that dinner. And then we're also going to probably hear from a politician 00:18:55 because Matt's got a lot of people that attend this thing. So make sure you mark June 12th. 00:18:58 Are there field days or May 22nd? Our first one that we're gonna have, that's an, uh, Madison, Alabama at Chad Henderson's place. 00:19:04 June 26th. We're gonna be up in Iowa at Kelly Garretts. And then August, we have a whole slate of field days. Uh, we're gonna be going August 5th at Verres. 00:19:12 We don't know exactly about a couple of changes we might have. So I'm not gonna tell you about those other ones 00:19:16 because we're still working on 'em. But you know what, stay tuned. Uh, you're invited to all those field days. 00:19:21 Also, I encourage you to check out, uh, a new show that we're doing. You can find it on extreme ags YouTube channel 00:19:26 or you can go to Extreme Ag Pharma or you can go to Acres tv. It's called the Grainery. It's shot at my farm. 00:19:31 Matt's been there. In fact, we're gonna be there next week filming, uh, a couple more episodes with Matt. 00:19:36 So you know what, check it out. It's called The Grainery. It's Real Talk with Real Farmers about real issues impacting 00:19:41 ag and a little bit more of the personal side of what we do here. Till next time, thanks for being here. He's Matt, you. 00:19:46 Thanks for being here, man. You bet. Till next time. Thanks for being here. Extreme ag cutting the curve. That's a wrap for this episode of Cutting the Curve. 00:19:53 Make sure to check out Extreme ag.farm for more great content to help you squeeze more profit out 00:19:58.885 --> 00:20:00.165