00:00 Talk about a dilemma. What happens when you work for a fertility company but you also farm? Well, that's exactly the case with Galen beer 00:06 and Stephanie Linco with Agro Liquid. They both farm and they also have their livelihood, but the fertility company, 00:12 and we're in a year where we're talking sub $4 corn, maybe $10 soybeans at some point. Galen, you're good about this. 00:19 You say, Hey, you gotta keep the farm alive. You gotta keep the financial picture in mind here. You can't just be fertilize, fertilize, 00:25 fertilize against your financial best wishes. Yeah. You have to start thinking about that, that profit. And so that means that you have to kind 00:33 of put yourself under the microscope or your expenses under the microscope. You can't be spending a dollar to get 80 cents in return. 00:40 It's easy to let those, uh, it costs creep up on you in good times. And then you don't maybe do the proper evaluation 00:46 as prices come down. You want to get big yields. You wanna be able to go to the coffee shop and tell the neighbors you did 240 bushel corn when they 00:53 didn't, and you wanna do all that. But the reality is you can do that so many times. And then the bank comes out 00:57 and says, by the way, you're not getting, you're not getting funded next year, Stephanie. Yeah, absolutely. You know, everybody wants 01:03 to brag about those top yields, but it comes back to good agronomics. You have to put those dollars 01:07 where they're gonna get the best return, and with that, it may not be the top yield. So you have to get comfortable 01:12 that you're not gonna get the highest yield in the coffee shop, but you're gonna have the best return 01:16 on that dollar per acre. You are better about this than many people. Which I, I mean, it's the farmer in you Galen, 01:22 because you said that once you're like, Hey, if you did the absolute recommendation, you and I did a, a recording with this. 01:27 Yep. If you did the absolute recommendation Yep. You'd be in that acre for, I don't know, call it, It was $300 And, and the return might be 01:35 Negative. It was. And so you can only lose 50 or a hundred bucks an AC or so long until you've eaten through all of your, uh, all of your capital. 01:41 Yep. And that's not good. What are you doing? Yeah. So on my farm, I'm just making sure that, uh, you focus your dollar for those nutrients 01:50 that give you the biggest bank for your buck. We know crops have certain biases. Corn loves zinc. So you've put your dollars there, the soybeans behind us, 01:58 like iron and manganese. In a normal year with good prices, you might do a broad spec spectrum of nutrients. 02:04 But in a year, like this year, put your dollars for the biggest bank for your buck is Stephanie, do we, do we run the risk 02:09 of depleting the soil? Do we run the risk of, uh, of long-term harm by doing this? Or are we better now than we were? 02:17 And it's like, no, no, we're, we're, we're staying, we're not hurting. You know, you do run that risk if you're gonna cut 02:23 back, you can mine the soil. But a lot of times we built those soils up to levels that are pretty good and years that economics aren't. 02:29 There is a time to kind of cash in from that bank that you've built up, but it's a one, maybe two year solution. 02:35 You need to look at that longer picture. If you wanna be in business years after this, your Is your husband to sit down with you 02:40 and say, Hey honey, I gotta tell you, um, I know that you want me to buy a bunch of stuff for the company, but also I gotta keep this farm alive 02:46 for another year. How did that discussion go? Yep. He holds me the same standards. He holds any salesman that walks on his farm 02:52 and I have to live up to that recommendation and still produce him a crop. And so really it's no different than anybody else. 02:58 If it goes on agri, if it goes on this way for a few years, where do we look five years from now? Still low commodity prices. Do we, do we stay? 03:05 Can this strategy, does it have staying power? It does have staying power. I mean, to Stephanie's point, there are some nutrients 03:10 that you're gonna try to make sure that you maintain in that soil. But I mean, we are going 03:14 to always base our recommendation off that soil test. We are not gonna let someone dig themselves a hole so deep that at the end of five years they gotta put everything they 03:23 make on $8 corn back in just to make up for this. Yeah. So we can, we can do this for a few years and still, the soil's fine. 03:29 The farm's fine. We didn't do any long-term damage. We can, we can, we can cut back on fertility and, and watch the thing you said be comfortable with, 03:37 Be comfortable with not getting the top yield, but you'll get better return on that anchor. I Like that hole right there. I think we're 03:42 gonna leave it right there. Galen beer. Stephanie Linco with Agri Liquid coming at you from Matthews Field, uh, day here at Matthews Farms 03:48 and Kula me, North Carolina where we're learning a lot of our sharing a lot and we're fighting through a couple of rain drops. 03:53 Till next time, Damien Mason with Extreme Act.