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."
"Over the years, we've got high phosphorus levels from manure applications. Even though we have such high P levels in the soil, we just can't get it into the plant. [Our dealer] said 'Here's a product, Accomplish, try that,' and right off the bat we were 0.1, 0.15 higher on our tissue samples. So year after year, we started running a little bit more, and the more we were running, the less commercial fertilizer we would have to buy," Indiana grower Kevin Kalb notes.
University of Illinois' Dr. Fred Below also weighs in.
"What I like to think of a product like Accomplish as is that it's trying to capture the essence of the value that's in that manure," he says. "They called it a fertilizer catalyst because one thing it does is it helps make immobile nutrients more available. There is a whole, vast source of nutrients in the soil, and if we can make some of those more available, that has a real value."
You can watch the video below.
See more by browsing our YouTube channel or by watching our film, Last Stand.
