Posted October 22, 2024 | By: Nutrien Ag Solutions

Crop Consultant Matt Baker discusses this year's harvest and planning for the next crop year. Hear his insights on grid sampling and why it’s important for a successful crop.

Episode Transcript:

Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here for This Week in Agribusiness. I'm Mike Pearson. Harvest continues across the country and some farmers are still working on getting those corn and soybeans out, in Kentucky, no less.  

This week's Agronomy for your Acres with our friends from Nutrien Ag Solutions takes us to Ekron, Kentucky, where Matt Baker, Nutrien Crop Consultant, has been working with his growers. And Matt, how's harvest coming along in your part of the state? We're probably 40 or 60 to 70% done with our corn harvest. 

Corn yields, a lot of my customers are, I think are pleasantly surprised with their corn yields there. They're slightly above average or above expectations. Our soybean harvest is probably 40 to 50% complete and soybean yields are good, but not anything to write home about. We had a lot of dry weather late that really affected our seed size on soybeans a lot.

We've got a lot of small beans and seems like a lot of the plants kind of died prematurely. So that's really, it's really kind of taken some of the top end off the soybeans. Absolutely. Those small beans seem to be common nearly everywhere this year. Matt, but with your farmers wrapping up harvest, I'm sure thoughts are turning to next year's season.

What's on growers’ minds as you talk to them in the combine? Yeah, so, you know, we're making seed variety selections for 2025. We're talking about our wheat crop is starting to go in this week, probably in the last seven days, a lot of our wheat has gone in and we're talking fall fertility and cover crops.

We're applying cover crops. Now we're starting to do some fall burn down. And here in a in short order, we'll be doing a lot of soil sampling as well. Soil sampling, of course, crucial when we've got input costs where they are. You want to make sure you're maximizing the return on those investments. What sort of soil sampling will you guys be doing here as we get into fall?

We'll do a lot of just random sampling in some of these fields, but we've kind of started picking up our grid sampling quite a bit. When you think about grid sampling, how does that differentiate itself from random sampling? What's the agronomists do that's different? So when we when we grid sample a field, you know, for example, we’ll be grid sampling this field after harvest here behind me, we will take this field and break it up into five acre grids.

We also do two and a half acre grids. We're doing five acres on this customer, but it gives us a more, it gives us a higher detailed view of how fertility and pH and all of these factors vary in a field as opposed to coming out here and random sampling and using, you know, a flat spread method for fertility.

It gives us a much higher and much more precise idea of what's happening and how things are varying in the field and helps us unlock some nutrients also that are either lacking or tied up or due to pH and allows us to correct those. Absolutely. And I imagine it allows you to have more options for variable rate applications as well when it comes to fertilizer. 

Yes, sir. We usually we typically kind of look at pH and how pH varies across the field and we'll create a variable rate line recommendation for this customer. And we'll come out here and variable rate spread the line and then we will, you know, sit down this winter and look at fertility and try to stay within a budget, but also not, you know, not short the fertility to the next crop coming in.

That's what it's all about. You got to have gas in the tank to get that next field across the finish line. If folks want to learn more about grid sampling, they can drop into any Nutrien Ag Solutions office and learn more at NutrienAgSolutions.ca. Matt Baker, thank you so much for speaking with us this week. Thank you, guys, I appreciate it.