With fall fertilizer season approaching, Agricen’s Scott Lay spoke with WITY Radio about using Titan XC to get more efficiency and return on investment out of dry fertilizer applications. 

Dennis - WITY Radio: I think Titan XC is going to be a great addition to producers' game plans here in the fall.

Scott - Agricen: Titan XC has been available for about 10 years now. With each successive fall, use increases as folks better understand the benefits of what a fertilizer efficiency technology can provide for their operations.

Soil health is the foundation of a successful crop. In our short video, The Plant Is Secondary, growers talk about their approach to improving their soil and keeping it healthy, including the role that Accomplish biocatalyst technology plays. 

"If your soil's healthy, obviously your crop's going to do what it needs to do," says Heath Cutrell, who farms in Virginia and across the state line into North Carolina.

Iowa farmer Kelly Garrett adds, "If we could take care of the biology of the soil, the plant is secondary. It's what happens when we do a good job with the biology." 

The corn growers in the video have seen firsthand how Accomplish technology can help with healthier soils and better nutrient availability for their crops. 

"Because of the Accomplish we're feeding the microbes, we're pushing that microbial activity and the mineralization, and we've giving ourselves nutrients," Don Stall, who farms in Michigan, says. "My soil tests have climbed and that's due to that fodder breaking down and returning that nutrient to us. It's a big deal."

Drought stress can cause significant corn yield reductions, particularly when it occurs after the V13 growth stage.

At V13 and beyond, drought stress can negatively impact silking, pollination, and kernel fill, with the greatest loss in yield associated with drought stress that occurs around the silking (R1) period. Drought stress causing four or more consecutive days of visible wilting during this period can lead to yield loss as high as 9 percent per day. Plants weakened by drought stress are also more susceptible to disease and insect damage, which can further compound yield losses.

What Options Do Corn Growers Have for Combating Drought Stress?

Although farmers can't control the weather, they do have options that can help them improve plant health and strengthen their crop's stress tolerance in the face of drought.

When Illinois farmer Benjamin Rice first heard about Titan XC, he thought it sounded too good to be true. But he was trying to find a way to increase the efficiency of the dry fertilizer he was spreading on his farm, so he decided to take it to the field and try it.

Benjamin took two different 80-acre fields, split them in half, and spread the north half of each field with Titan XC-treated dry fertilizer and the south half with untreated dry fertilizer in the fall. He also took two different 40-acre fields and did the same, but spread the treated and untreated dry fertilizer in the spring.

He wanted to commit multiple years to the trial to see if Titan XC consistently worked. For three years, he repeated the side by side trials on the same fields.

“We’re on a corn and beans crop rotation. After the first year I saw a yield increase consistently on the side of the field treated with Titan XC,” he says. “After all three years, both spread in the fall or spread in the spring, my field averages made 6.8 bushel better on corn and 2.6 bushel better on beans.”

Along with raising cattle, the DeBaillie family has been growing corn and soybeans in northwestern Illinois for over 65 years. Today, Randy, Rob and Russell DeBaillie, who are the third-generation of farmers in their family, farm around 6,000 acres of land in a longstanding no-till farming practice. Extract PBA is one of the products they rely on to help them run a successful operation.

Like other growers, the DeBaillies like to get their crops in as early as possible, usually in the last week in April. They typically plant corn at 36,000 seeds per acre in their highly productive rolling clay hills. Given their northern location in Orion, Illinois, harvest ordinarily ends around Thanksgiving.

Rob, Russell and Randy DeBaillie of Orion, Illinois - on the farm and ready to plant in an Extract-treated field.

At the Nutrien Ag Solutions branch in Manlius, Illinois, farmer and crop consultant Chad Taylor has been witness to many Titan XC success stories. One that particularly stands out in his mind is the effect that Titan XC has had on one of his grower client's fields, helping to transform farmland that was largely phosphorus deficient into land with optimal soil phosphorus levels. 

"The farm was quite run down when he purchased it, and we've been pretty amazed with the activity of Titan XC in just a short time," says Chad.

When the grower first took over the field in 2012, soil tests taken in fall showed that phosphorus levels were very low throughout the field, with an average soil phosphorus level of just 41.5 lbs/acre. Five years later, after applying Titan XC-treated phosphorus and potassium fertilizers every fall, soil phosphorus levels were excellent. In 2017, the date of the most recent soil tests (taken in spring), the average soil phosphorus level had increased to 122.5 lbs/acre. 

In the fall of 2017, Benjamin Rice, a crop consultant for Nutrien Ag Solutions in Sidney, Illinois, was faced with a challenge. 

He typically recommended Titan XC to his grower customers as a treatment for applied dry phosphorus and potassium fertilizers to help increase yield and profitability. Making the case for using this fertilizer biocatalyst was easy with growers who were blanket spreading dry fertilizers, but demonstrating the value of Titan XC was more complicated with a customer who used variable rate (VRT) applied fertilizer and did not want to pay more for the Titan XC technology. Benjamin needed to figure out a way to prove that Titan XC could have a nutrient efficiency and yield benefit when used with his customer's VRT fertilizer.

When it comes to fall dry fertilizer applications, poor soil conditions and bad weather can significantly decrease fertilizer efficiency. Treating dry fertilizer with Titan XC before it goes out in the field can help  growers address these challenges and get the highest return on their fertilizer investment.

In a demonstration conducted by Nutrien Ag Solutions in Galesburg, Illinois, Extract PBA was sprayed in fall 2017 on a corn field post-harvest. In spring of 2018, stalks were pulled and split to examine the differences in residue breakdown between treated and untreated parts of the field.

As seen in the photo, the Extract-treated stalks were in a more advanced stage of decomposition than untreated stalks by early spring. 

Extract PBA was sprayed on Nov. 29, 2017. This photo shows corn stalks from treated and untreated parts of the field that were pulled and split on March 23, 2018. 

An application of Extract PBA can help growers keep a tight focus on nutrient efficiency by powerfully releasing nutrients from residue for use by the coming crop. 

In this side by side trial conducted in Fairbury, Illinois, one half of the harvested corn field was sprayed with Extract PBA in late September and the other was left untreated. There was very little moisture in the first 6 weeks after application, and photos were taken approximately 8 weeks after application. 

As the photo shows, decay on the treated stalks was well advanced compared to the untreated check after only 8 weeks.