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Soil Analysis Counts
Using Fertilizer Aimed At Goal Jars ‘Door That’s Hard To Open’
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER
MidAmerica Farmer Grower
MCGEHEE, ARK.
A very aggressive soil sampling program is a big key to production for Matt Miles of McGehee, Ark., in the southeast part of the state. He’s dedicated to making sure he has the right fertility.
“We do two-acre grid samples, I have a consultant, Robb Dedman, who does that for me,” he said. “He also consults with me on insects and weed pressure in soybeans. He checks my soybean fields twice a week. He also does the grid sample and then we take that grid sample and figure out what we need from the grid sample.”
It’s almost mandatory that Miles puts a ton and a half of chicken litter out regardless. The landowner of one farm wants two tons applied, so that’s done on that farm every year. He considers the chicken litter a conservation practice, though some might not think so.
“It’s taking a waste product from an animal and using it in the field to grow crops. I look at it that way.”
Chicken litter is a part of his precision fertilizer applications.
Making sure his fertility is right, Matt Miles of McGehee, Ark. makes use of chicken litter, which he considers a conservation practice.
Photo by John LaRose, Jr.
“We take an analysis of each chicken house and get an idea of the P&K levels in that house of litter; then we subtract that from what the grid samples say we need,” he explained. “For instance, if we're going to grid sample a field that's going into soybeans, we use a yield goal of 90 bushels; we may not make 90 bushels, but if you don't add that availability out there in your fertilizer for corn, beans or whatever, it's a little harder to make it. It gives you a door that's hard to open. So we take each crop, figure out what our yield goal is, take the variable rate, take the grid sample, subtract the litter.
“One of my best friends started his litter business on my farm. We put out about 200 tons that year. Last year we put out about 9,000 tons. So you can see how that's evolved. I feel like we get a lot of extra micronutrients and organic matter, and anything organic has to be good,” Miles reasoned.
Chicken litter is good for the environment, it enables the chicken producer to get rid of the waste, and it also puts an organic back into the soil instead of putting something that is not as good for the soil.
With 6,300 acres made up of a combination of cotton, beans, corn and wheat, with a double crop of beans, Miles employs seven part time employees, five full time workers, his son, Layne, and his wife, Sherrie. He has one farm in McGehee, and one farm about 18 miles south of McGehee in Boydell Ark., which is named Smiles.
“Smiles actually stands for Sherrie Miles, that’s how we came up with the name,” he explained. “It’s pretty much sandy loam ground, we have some heavy clay but the majority of the farm is sand. We started out predominately as cotton farmers, and as the prices evolved in corn and soybeans we started becoming more corn and soybean farmers with less cotton. This area used to be probably 90 percent cotton on the prime land, and now I’d say it’s probably 15 percent. We hung in there and still grow some cotton, still own a cotton picker, but our bread and butter today is corn and soybeans.”
In previous years, Miles grew anywhere from 200 to 500 acres of cotton, leaving 1,500 to 3,000 acres for each one of the other crops. Last year he had 1,600 acres of corn and 4,000 acres of soybeans. With wheat prices good, he tries to stay in a rotation, partly because he likes rotating crops, and partly because the prices dictate that.
“Looking into next year, we could very easily be 75 percent soybeans if the corn price doesn't come up,” he predicted. “Some of the land we also share rent. When you share rent that landowner has an interest in what commodity you grow and the price of it. A lot of times maybe you want to grow one commodity but you wind up growing another because the revenue is better for the landowner also. So, I am a cotton, corn and soybean farmer.”
Last year was a phenomenal year for him, with record yields in every crop, including wheat, with corn and cotton actually his second best year. The year prior, he had his best corn yield. But every crop was outstanding last year.
“Compared to this year, we had the same weather pattern in the summer, all the crops turned out about the same, although cotton wasn't as good as it was last year,” he reported. “Corn and soybeans turned out a little better, so the last two years have been unbelievably good for us.
“We’re running above 80 bushel on soybeans, a little over 230 on corn, and a little over 1,500 pounds on cotton. Sherrie gave me those figures today. We had an outstanding wheat crop, wheat yield is a little over 100 bushels. Based on what they were five years ago, today’s yields are a lot different.
“Five years ago we were probably looking at 65 bushel beans and 1,350 pounds of cotton. We started raising corn in 2006, and we harvested in the 200 range. Wheat run about 75. So, with the combination of genetics, the right weather, and changing our management style, we’ve made progress,” he said.
He gave the cotton every input it needed 10 years ago. Soybeans was always on the poor land, so he used less effort there. It just got what it needed, as it was just a step-child crop. He didn't plant a lot of wheat unless it was just dryland that wouldn't grow anything else.
“As these prices evolved and these cash crops looked a lot better, we adapted the idea that we can take a soybean, put the same inputs and time into it as we do cotton and see what it makes,” he recalled. “Weather is very important on any crop, but we paid special attention to the details. Corn was a new beast we never farmed until 2006 and actually it's probably the most fun crop to grow. It's pretty much standardized what you're going to do to it, the fertilizer you're going to put on, then just hope for the right weather to make it work. You plant it in March and harvest it in August and then you're finished.
Meeting when they were just teenagers and both from a farming background, Matt (right) and his wife Sherrie now farm 6,300 acres in their operation.
Photo by John LaRose, Jr.
“Corn was a unique crop and we loved it in our operation. I remember 10 years ago Sharrie and I ran down to Louisiana and saw all this corn they grew no matter what the price was, and I said, ‘man someday I want to grow this crop, it just looks like it would be neat.’ So we got the opportunity. When the price hit $4, I think it was 2006, we started with 2,400 acres, and then we were adding acres; it was a learning curve, at harvest time you're cutting 200 bushel corn. When you cut beans you’d have a combine and maybe two trucks, and when you're cutting 200 bushel corn you need a combine and five trucks. It was overwhelming. We just learned to add whatever a crop needs, whatever crop it is, and all these commodities went up to the point where they’re all profitable. Now you can look at each commodity and determine which one is more profitable.”
For the past two-three years, all have been profitable, so with cotton a little bit of a struggle for a little profit, he went to less cotton. He just gave the crop whatever it needed, and dabbled with the idea of doing the same thing to the other crops that were secondary crops. He did wheat the same way, if the wheat needed X amount of nitrogen to make above 80 bushel then that's what he added.
His fields are about 98 percent irrigated using about 95 wells.
“We try to have some type of well every 50 acres,” he explained. “I have 112 acres that has three wells on it but that's just the way it worked out. We do everything surface irrigation to where we catch our runoff water and put it back on the crops. We have a water recovery system where you pump water out of the well, run it through the field to a storage pit. We’ll reuse that water on other fields over and over again. But we tend to use surface irrigation and winter water storage, therefore you know what the water supply is.”
He has some reservoirs, but not on every field. One property has a 50-acre reservoir and it's actually an old bayou. When they cut the new man-made canal and drained the area, it left off that part and made it a reservoir.
“We also have some man-made reservoirs that we did, one is on a farm down in Boydell and we call it a water pit. You just dig a big hole and it ties into the break, and work it from there. You capture all that runoff water there and we’re still trying to figure out ways to do more of that. We have applied for an EQUIP program to pump water from Bayou Bartholomew into our recovery pit. We’ll use that runoff from someone else’s land, pump it onto our ground and it will recycle into our reservoir again. I wish I had that on every field, on every farm, but some places it's efficient and some places it's not. If you have a 40-acre field in the middle of someone else’s land it just doesn't work.”
Miles is well over the top on precision agriculture. Everything he has includes GPS tracking as far as the steering. He uses the grid samples when he spreads potash in the variable rate spreader truck, and he uses yield maps in all the combines.
“That’s another thing Robb does, I guess you would call it data management but he takes care of all that data. He makes sure it’s loaded on the combines. We preload the information on the variety we want to plant so when someone is planting he is recording in the field, including the variety in the field and what population we’re running. We have our monitors hooked up where we can watch our population continuously to make sure we are putting out the right amount of seed.”
He’s using about 160,000 seeds per acre on soybeans.
“Research is showing that’s too much, but we’re planting a twin row on a 38-inch bed,” Miles explained. “Those seeds are staggered on that bed so they don’t have the pushing power that they would have on a regular 30-inch planter like most midwestern use. You have all those soybeans in a line so you have them helping each other push that soil up after a rain. With a twin row 38-inch, that’s where we’ve found our best yields; half of those plants are 7 inches away from each other so they don't have near as many helpers to get the crust off after a rain.
“So we tend to go a little bit higher seeding rates, around 160,000; we used to be 170,000, and I'm still steadily lowering that; but when we're planting single row, we plant some single row 38-inch and we plant that at around 140,000. We feel our best yield crop is 160,000, twin row on a 38-inch bed. The reason why we have to go on a 38-inch bed is because we furrow irrigate. We don’t use a pivot or levee, so we have to have enough room there in that furrow to get the water from the top of the field into the pit at the bottom.”
Seeding rates on other crops include 34,000 for corn, which produces 225 bushel per acre; and three seeds per foot, or about 40,000 on cotton.
Miles’ farming background is unique. His grandfather farmed and his dad was in the trucking business, later getting into farming. Then he went back to trucking, and again switched to farming in 1980.
“So I’m at least a third generation farmer,” Miles stated. “But my dad, from when I was five until I was 12, he just did trucking and when I was 12 we moved back to McGehee and he returned to farming.”
There were lean years during this time, but they led him to a meeting with his future wife.
“My wife is at least a fourth-generation farmer,” he said. “The field that we cut 100 bushels on last year was in her family since the 1920s; we were able to purchase land from her father when he retired. I've been in farming, grew up on the farm, then we were trucking and when I was 12 we came back to the farm again. So basically I’ve been around the farm my whole life. I did not know my grandfather; he passed away when I was six months old. So I cannot say ‘I remember being on the tractor with my grandpa,’ I didn't get to experience that. I did get to experience it with my dad but not my grandfather.
“Sherrie grew up in the same scenario on a farm. Funny thing the way we met: Actually my dad was sick and couldn’t complete the harvest so her dad harvested cotton for my dad, but he wouldn't take any money. Then my dad bought him a real nice coat and took it to him. I was 13 and I knew she drove a pickup and had blonde hair and I thought that was cool. She was 15, two years older than me. When we pulled up in that driveway for my dad to give him that gift, I thought: One of these days when I get a little older I’m going to see if I can see this lady. So when I was 15 we went on our first date. I wasn’t even old enough to drive then, but we’ve been married 25 years now.
“The first piece of land of any size that I farmed was a 56-acre field of her dad’s. He had extra land, during the government program time when you could only farm so much land in order to qualify for a program. My dad was farming and he didn’t have any extra land, so Sherrie and I rented that from her dad. We actually own it now. You could say between her dad and my dad they helped us get started. We started with zero. We didn’t start with tractors handed down or money in the bank. She had a $10,000 CD. We took that $10,000 and put a down payment on our first John Deere 4840. For her to let me do that was awesome! She was the type of person, whatever you want to do we will do. If you think you can make it at this then this is what we’ll do. She took her life savings and let me put it down on a tractor.
Miles has an agribusiness degree from the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He had a football scholarship to Arkansas State, he had several offers actually, but his mother passed away during signing time and he didn’t want to move too far away from his dad. He started crunching numbers, weighing his scholarship money against the spending, reasoning through the idea that he could not go pro. Then he decided he could make that much driving a tractor for his dad.
“So I moved back home to McGehee, finishing school at Monticello in the ag department,” he recalled. “I enjoyed that, but I either drove an 18 wheeler or tractor just about every minute that I was not in school. I was earning money to pay for my education, and I wanted to make sure I always had an open eye to help my dad. It worked out pretty well. I taught Layne how you can study, he is attending the same ag program and has some of the same teachers I had, I taught him how you can study on a tractor and actually spend more hours studying than if you were at home.”
That is especially true now with precision ag, as you can hit the auto button and the equipment follows the rows; you don't even have to be looking at the tractor.
“I did get a degree and I’m thankful for that,” he said. “I used that degree actually when I graduated college. I was determined, I’m either going to get a job or some land whichever comes first; and my first interview was at First National Bank here at McGehee, where they wanted an ag loan officer. So, straight from college I went to work as an ag loan officer, farming that 56 acres on the side. That’s all we had, 56 acres, and I worked at the bank. Later, I was a rice merchandiser for about a year, and then I knew what I wanted to do but I had to wait for the right opportunity. We found some landowners willing to take a chance on us young kids; it’s hard for a young guy to start if you don’t have any help. Then my dad passed away in 2001, and I had his land and my land and I just built it from there. I had about 2,000 acres then, and we went to 6,300 acres since then.”
Miles’ formal education has ended, but he still keeps soaking up knowledge from publications, at no-till conferences, through contacts he’s met from a state record in soybeans, at farm shows and anywhere he can go to meet people who are smarter than he is.
He has conservation in mind with nearly everything he does, from minimum and no-till, to reusing surface water runoff, all variable rate applications, applying chemicals where they’re needed instead of a blanket application, and using low drip tips to direct applications on plants that need it.
“We try to reduce trips across the field to decrease our diesel usage, we use the Phaucet program on our irrigation wells so they'll be very efficient and limit wasting water there,” he said. “Phaucet is a computer program which considers the elevation of the field for furrow irrigation; it gauges the water flow from high in the field to low so the water reaches the low end of the field from all rows at the same time. You enter the elevation of the field and the length of your rows into the program, and it calculates the size of the holes you punch into the polypipe, so the water flows through all the furrows and goes to the reservoir at the same time.
“You may start at one spot with a 3/4-inch hole and if your rows get shorter you may have a 7/16-inch hole farther over. I feel like that’s a big plus as far as our conservation,” he summed. ∆
BETTY VALLE GEGG-NAEGER: Senior Staff Writer, MidAmerica Farmer Grower
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